varying values. a play or a short story. and dramatist. to tell. Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin. also of Russia. Sentences are created. by Herman Melville. In a book. a Russian writer of the early 1800s. and regional tastes. In such works—The Old Man and the Sea. of course. for a reason: To show. The sheer panoply of nationalities represented in this book. but look closely and you’ll also ﬁnd art. The great ones. crafted. by the most talented and ingenious authors. brings up an
9
. hail from ancient Greece. Aeschylus. however. by William Shakespeare—it’s the art one ﬁnds within that sets them apart from the rest. So how is it possible to whittle down a list of inﬂuential writers—artists of the written word—to just 100 people? That’s the challenge—making choices. essayist. are meant for reading. everything is there. chapters built. Others. are for study. or in any piece of writing. such as Sophocles. to convey a message. paragraphs and stanzas formatted. The 13th-century Suﬁ poet Rūmī is known today as a musically inﬂuenced master on subjects like mysticism. and to ultimately compile a reference that does its best to envelop world history and disparate cultures. Moby Dick. In it you’ll ﬁnd words. and spirituality. as well as variances in style and theme. in detail. and is most famous for his novel W and Peace. Leo Tolstoy. Hamlet. are paradigms of English literature. and stories told. In a book or a poem. Many individuals included in this compilation. is a founder of modern literature in that country.7
Introduction
7
O
pen a book—any book. Most works of writing. considered by many to be one of the greatar est books ever put into print. was a novelist. by Ernest Hemingway. and Aristophanes. on the page. including the three mentioned above. words are joined together at the whim of the author. quite simply. based on the evidence. love. by a writer proud enough to sign his or her name to the work.

a ﬂuid and furious work of art that could almost be read in one long breath. all those featured in this collection are inﬂuential. the founder of modern Chinese literature and a huge inﬂuence on Communism in that country. On the Road. through his or her writing. touched the hearts and souls of millions. What’s more. in China and the East—that a direct comparison would certainly be difﬁcult. Lu Xun’s.” either literally or in their imaginations. takes them for a ride. Jack Kerouac is a prime example. Kerouac typed the book on one long scroll of paper. Kerouac. the English novelist who is remembered for writing one great masterwork. just like Sal Paradise. was published in 1957. Written like a jazz piece. to change the way the world thinks. It paints a picture of America like no other novel before it. for the most part. Can Lu Xun. They are all “greats.
10
. to take to “the road. and left their mark on the world. the book’s narrator. but their spheres of inﬂuence are so different—Brontë’s in the English-speaking world. Through their work. and makes them dizzy. it seems spontaneous and improvised. cover to cover. they’ve reached out to the masses. But how exactly is inﬂuence deﬁned in this case? Perhaps it’s the ability of one person. Writers are inﬂuenced by the places in which they live and the cultures in which they are steeped. achieved instant fame when his second novel. spins them around.” and they all have had inﬂuence on their respective readerships. rightfully be compared to someone like Emily Brontë. As the title of this book indicates. On the Road captures readers’ imaginations. the book has dared countless readers to explore the world themselves.7
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interesting question. an American writer and the literary leader of the so-called Beat Generation. Wuthering Heights? Perhaps.

which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. (1977) which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Several authors have paid homage to Austen by writing ﬁctionalized accounts of her life or using the themes and style of her novels as the inspiration for their own narratives. Her penned explorations of everyday life in middle-class England are timeless classics primarily because her characters have many of the same foibles. But Morrison’s inﬂuence extends well beyond awards and honours. Prize-winning authors. but the author’s works have permeated modern culture in a way she never could have predicted. Her
11
. and groups dedicated to the reading and discussion of Austen’s work are virtually everywhere. and activist. This ability to sway audiences so deeply. particularly Jane Austen. Not only are Austen’s books required reading in many school curriculums. a century or more after the fact is arguably the very deﬁnition of inﬂuential. and become embroiled in many of the same situations. Several of the authors in this book ﬁt that bill. In addition to her status as a best-selling author. Movies and television miniseries based on her novels have proved quite successful. the ability to remain relevant hundreds of years after initial publication.7
Introduction
7
Perhaps a writer’s inﬂuence is determined by timeless prominence. may be considered highly inﬂuential as well. and in so many ways. Morrison became the ﬁrst black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. she is also a teacher. lecturer. national and regional chapters of the Jane Austen Society dot the globe. as contemporary citizens the world over in the present day. and Beloved (1987). whose mastery of language and storytelling is acknowledged by prestigious literary organizations. In 1993. Toni Morrison is the author of the books Song of Solomon.

support or defame a political regime. onto shelves and into readers’ hands. he denounced his early work and began to tackle more serious issues. then Black Boy (1945). however. Wright’s success paved the way for future generations of black writers. racism. His poems soon took on the tenor of propaganda. The war in Spain polarized Neruda’s political beliefs. Wright succeeded in getting first Native Son (1940). he hoped to stir the masses into a patriotic
12
. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda is a case in point. in this case. drawing heavily on his own romantic adventures and disappointments. helped strengthen the resolve of those in the civil rights movement. socially conscious level. which. she has reached and inﬂuenced millions on a much more personal. in turn. about the implications of racism in America and the struggle that blacks and women—and black women in particular— continue to go through to secure their place in an often hostile world. She’s made readers think about issues facing society. which began to inﬁltrate his work. Neruda spoke of love and heartbreak. Throughout her career. The same holds for Richard Wright.7
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work in these arenas cannot help but inform her writing. or effect change by shedding light on an untenable situation. Through her novels. In the beginning of his career. Morrison has delved into black culture and the black female experience in America. At a time when many publishing houses were reluctant to distribute books by or about blacks. With carefully crafted prose or a verse. After being named an honorary consul and being posted in Spain during that country’s civil war. Protest fiction is that which tackles social injustice. a writer can inﬂuence individual allegiances. who brought protest fiction to the fore as an American literary movement.

in large part. to keep readers up at night. he continued to write works of ﬁction that were thinly veiled criticisms of the Soviet way of life. When all is said and done. sometimes anguished. the voice of the Chilean people.7 Introduction
7
fervour with simple yet lyric passages and sombre. Political climates change. He returned years later and is now considered by many to be among the most signiﬁcant Latin American writers of the 20th century. a historical narrative of the Soviet prison system that blends ﬁction with ﬁrsthand accounts by the author and other former prisoners. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in a prison camp for criticizing Joseph Stalin. turning page after page. After all. He later turned his prison experience into his ﬁrst novel. The government tried to suppress his masterwork. Through his writing he became. Buoyed by the reception that book received. just so they can learn what happens next. At that time he was welcomed as a hero and credited with foretelling the collapse of the Communist government. The Gulag Archipelago. That book resulted in him and his family being expelled from the country. K. and Solzhenitsyn returned to his homeland after the fall of the Soviet Union some 20 years after he was exiled. perhaps what makes a writer inﬂuential is simply the ability to entertain. The outspoken and rebellious nature of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s writings brought the wrath of his country’s government down on him as well. the books of J. A soldier for the Soviet Union during World War II. Rowling do not masquerade as political commentary or
13
. which was an immediate success. Neruda’s activist tendencies eventually got him into trouble. however. and he wound up ﬂeeing his native country in 1948 to avoid prosecution for openly criticizing Chile’s right-leaning president. imagery.

however brieﬂy. leading readers to speak out themselves and demand an equitable resolution. inﬂuence can mean so many things and can be measured in so many ways. highlight an injustice. And that’s the real reason we read. one can’t read a work by authors such as those detailed here without being inﬂuenced in some way. The one way in which Rowling’s books wield strong inﬂuence is in getting children interested in reading again. No. An author’s writing might. Those who read the works of any of the writers proﬁled in this book may very well discover an experience they’ve perhaps never had before. with its insight. from the travails of the life they’re living. Whatever the case.7
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allegory. nor do they have pretensions of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature—although several ardent fans have petitioned the Nobel committee on Rowling’s behalf. They might have their imagination sparked and be transported.
14
. instead Rowling’s Harry Potter series is simply a tale well told. The truth is. with a truly magical setting and characters that capture the reader’s attention and affection. That’s the power of great writing.

.

.

Tyrtaeus. little is known of him beyond the fact that his was the name attached in antiquity by the Greeks themselves to the poems. then Homer must assuredly be one of the greatest of the world’s literary artists. Alcman. for the two epics provided the basis of Greek education and culture throughout the Classical age and formed the backbone of humane education down to the time of the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity. the Homeric epics had a profound impact on the Renaissance culture of Italy. Indirectly through the medium of Virgil’s Aeneid (loosely molded after the patterns of the Iliad and the Odyssey).7 Homer
7
HOMER
(ﬂourished 9th or 8th century BCE?. directly through their revival under Byzantine culture from the late 8th century CE onward. Although these two great epic poems of ancient Greece have always been attributed to the shadowy ﬁgure of Homer. If this assumption is accepted.
Early References
Implicit references to Homer and quotations from the poems date to the middle of the 7th century BCE. Archilochus. and Callinus in the 7th century and Sappho and others in the early 6th adapted
17
. Ionia? [now in Turkey])
H
omer is the presumed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Since then the proliferation of translations has helped to make them the most important poems of the classical European tradition. That there was an epic poet called Homer and that he played the primary part in shaping the Iliad and the Odyssey—so much may be said to be probable. and subsequently through their passage into Italy with the Greek scholars who ﬂed westward from the Ottomans. He is also one of the most inﬂuential authors in the widest sense.

and others joined in. The idea that Homer had descendants known as “Homeridae. The general belief that Homer was a native of Ionia (the central part of the western seaboard of Asia Minor) seems a reasonable conjecture for the poems themselves are in predominantly Ionic dialect.” probably of late 7th-century composition. no authenticated local
18
. and claimed that they could have lived no more than 400 years before his own time. Although Smyrna and Chios early began competing for the honour (the poet Pindar.” and that they had taken over the preservation and propagation of his poetry. At the same time scenes from the epics became popular in works of art. popular in many circles throughout antiquity. the 5th century BCE. The historian Herodotus assigned the formulation of Greek theology to Homer and Hesiod. By the 5th century biographical ﬁctions were well under way. associated Homer with both). This should be contrasted with the superﬁcial assumption. The Pre-Socratic philosopher Heracleitus of Ephesus made use of a trivial legend of Homer’s death—that it was caused by chagrin at not being able to solve some boys’ riddle about catching lice—and the concept of a contest of quotations between Homer and Hesiod (after Homer. that Homer must have lived not much later than the Trojan War about which he sang. The pseudo-Homeric “Hymn to Apollo of Delos. claimed to be the work of “a blind man who dwells in rugged Chios.7
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Homeric phraseology and metre to their own purposes and rhythms.” a reference to a tradition about Homer himself. It was not long before a kind of Homeric scholarship began: Theagenes of Rhegium in southern Italy toward the end of the same century wrote the ﬁrst of many allegorizing interpretations. the most ancient of Greek poets) may have been initiated in the Sophistic tradition. goes back at least to the early 6th century BCE. early in the 5th century BCE.

Such doubts began in antiquity itself and depended mainly on the difference of genre (the Iliad being martial and heroic. Their qualities are signiﬁcant of
19
. oral poet or not.
Homer as an Oral Poet
But even if his name is known and his date and region can be inferred.7
Homer
7
memory survived anywhere of someone who. it seems plausible to conclude that the period of composition of the large-scale epics (as distinct from their much shorter predecessors) was the 9th or 8th century. but they may be reinforced by subtle differences of vocabulary even apart from those imposed by different subjects. must have been remarkable in his time. Homer remains primarily a projection of the great poems themselves. and that scenes from the epic begin to appear on pots at just about the same time. The Odyssey may belong near the end of this century. It may be no coincidence that cults of Homeric heroes tended to spring up toward the end of the 8th century. The most concrete piece of ancient evidence is that his descendants. there is some doubt over whether the Iliad and the Odyssey were even composed by the same main author. the Homeridae. which is of some use in determining when Homer lived. The similarities of the two poems are partly due to the coherence of the heroic poetical tradition that lay behind both. with several features pointing more clearly to the 8th. the Iliad closer to its middle. lived on the Ionic island of Chios.
Modern Inferences
Modern scholars agree with the ancient sources only about Homer’s general place of activity. the Odyssey picaresque and often fantastic). Admittedly. Partly on the basis of the internal evidence of the poems.

the story of the wrath of Achilles. in the shape of a monumental poem that required more than a single hour or evening to sing and could achieve new and far more complex effects. It is simultaneously an exploration of the heroic ideal in all its self-contradictoriness—its insane and grasping pride. which would have taken four or ﬁve long evenings. The Iliad—consisting of more than 16. that is
20
.000 verses. its magniﬁcent but animal strength. in literary and psychological terms. the Iliad and the Odyssey exemplify certain of the minor inconsistencies of all oral poetry. whether resident at a royal court or performing at the invitation of a town’s aristocracy. Yet the overriding impression is one of powerful unity. Indeed Homer’s own term for a poet is aoidos. worked with relatively short poems that could be given completely on a single occasion. Homeric tradition was an oral one: this was a kind of poetry made and passed down by word of mouth and without the intervention of writing. its ultimate if obtuse humanity. These poems must have provided the backbone of the tradition inherited by Homer. The poem is. in truth. the greatest warrior on the Greek side. but they also reveal something more speciﬁc about his technique and the kind of poet he was. and perhaps more.7
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his taste and his view of the world.” Ordinary aoidoi. What Homer himself seems to have done is to introduce the concept of a quite different style of poetry. and occasionally the composer’s amalgamation of traditional material into a large-scale structure shows through. to perform—is not merely a distillation of the whole protracted war against Troy. “singer.
The Poems
Even apart from the possibilities of medium-scale elaboration. than those attainable in the more anecdotal and episodic songs of his predecessors.

Next he restores his heroic status by means of the funeral games for Patroclus. and in the concluding book. solitary and by night. The main elements include the situation in Ithaca. and so on. and Helen. Menelaus. and his narrative of his fantastic adventures after leaving Troy.7 Homer
7
announced in its very ﬁrst words. Polyphemus. in which individual encounters alternate with mass movements of the opposing armies. The Odyssey tends to be blander in expression and sometimes more diffuse in the progress of its action. The battle poetry is based on typical and frequently recurring elements and motifs. Yet for thousands of verses on end Achilles is an unseen presence. In book 22 he kills the deluded Hector. and the 16th. are powerless before her arrogant suitors as they despair of Odysseus’s return from the siege of Troy. at the poem’s halfway point. Telemachus. consists of long scenes of battle. Achilles is compelled by the gods to restore civilized values and his own magnanimity by surrendering Hector’s body to King Priam. Patroclus’s death two-thirds of the way through the poem brings Achilles back into the ﬁght. Odysseus’s dangerous passage. Odysseus’s wife. and his encounters there with Nestor. from Calypso’s island to that of the Phaeacians. follows. but it is also subtly varied by highly individualized episodes and set pieces: the catalog of troop contingents. in which the quarrel ﬂares up. and their young son. as well as Telemachus’s secret journey to the Peloponnese for news of his father. including his escape from the cave of the Cyclops. the formal duels between Paris and Menelaus and Ajax and Hector. where Penelope. Helen’s identifying of the Achaean princes. His arrival back in Ithaca. is followed by his meeting with
21
. in which Achilles makes the crucial concession of allowing his friend Patroclus to ﬁght on his behalf. opposed by the sea-god Poseidon himself. Much of the poetry between the ﬁrst book. but it presents an even more complex and harmonious structure than the Iliad.

but the frequency and the richness of the divine assemblies in the Iliad. He grew up in the turbulent period when the Athenian democracy. The result is an impressive amalgam of literary power and reﬁnement. his self-revelation to the faithful swineherd Eumaeus and then to Telemachus. on a massive scale. Gela. The Iliad and the Odyssey owe their unique status to the creative conﬂuence of tradition and design. the crystalline ﬁxity of a formulaic style. Laertes. and its gory fulﬁllment. his recounting to her of his adventures. their complicated plan for disposing of the suitors. and the restitution. his meeting with his aged father. the ﬁrst of classical Athens’s great dramatists. The participation of the gods can both dignify human events and make them seem trivial—or tragic. of stability in his island kingdom of Ithaca. and the mobile spontaneity of a brilliant personal vision. owe their preeminence not so much to their antiquity and to their place in Greek culture as a whole but to their timeless success in expressing. 525/524 BCE—d. with Athena’s help. raised the emerging art of tragedy to great heights of poetry and theatrical power.
AESCHYLUS
(b. so much of the triumph and the frustration of human life. Homer’s inﬂuence seems to have been strongest in some of the most conspicuous formal components of the poems. Finally comes the recognition by his faithful Penelope. 456/455 BCE. probably reﬂect the taste and capacity of the main composer. The Iliad and the Odyssey. having
22
.7
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his protector-goddess Athena. or the peculiarly personal and ambivalent relationship between Odysseus and Athena in the Odyssey. however. Sicily)
A
eschylus. his elaborate disguises. It must for long have been part of the heroic tradition.

assigns Aeschylus 13 ﬁrst prizes. Aeschylus was known as the “Father of Tragedy. and recitation. since sets of four plays rather than separate ones were judged. This play was produced in the competition of the spring of 472 BCE and won ﬁrst prize. Aeschylus wrote approximately 90 plays.7
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of Artemisium and Salamis. the earliest of his works to survive. of these.) The actor could assume different roles by changing masks and costumes.” Aeschylus’s inﬂuence on the development of tragedy was fundamental. the Oresteia trilogy. Aeschylus went to Sicily again. perhaps based on the ofﬁcial lists. including satyr plays as well as tragedies. though he is said to have suffered one memorable defeat. Aeschylus’s later career is a record of sustained dramatic success. survives). According to the philosopher Flavius Philostratus. Greek drama was limited to one actor and a chorus engaged in a largely static recitation. Seven Against Thebes. (The chorus was a group of actors who responded to and commented on the main action of a play with song. Aeschylus vastly increased the drama’s possibilities for dialogue and dramatic tension and allowed more variety and freedom in
24
. dance. Aeschylus recouped the loss with victory in the next year. with his Oedipus trilogy (of which the third play. in 458. about 80 titles are known. Previous to him. Around this time Aeschylus is said to have visited Sicily to present Persians again at the tyrant Hieron I’s court in Syracuse. This would mean that well over half of his plays won. After producing the masterpiece among his extant works. or victories. By adding a second actor with whom the ﬁrst could converse. 467. One account. but he was limited to engaging in dialogue only with the chorus. at the hands of the novice Sophocles. Only seven tragedies have survived entire. whose entry at the Dionysian festival of 468 BCE was victorious over the older poet’s entry. His responses to the Persian invasion found expression in his play Persians.

trained his choruses in their songs and dances. which subsequently became a place of pilgrimage for writers. and in the universal themes which they explore so honestly. it is probably true that. His plays are of lasting literary value in their majestic and compelling lyrical language. and emotional intensity. which enabled him to treat the fundamental problem of evil with singular honesty and success. He makes bold use of compound epithets. for all its power of depicting evil and the fear and consequences of evil.” Aeschylus was an innovator in other ways as well. A ludicrous story that he was killed when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald pate was presumably fabricated by a later comic writer. Aeschylus “reduced the chorus’ role and made the plot the leading actor. majesty. Living at a time when the Greek people still truly felt themselves surrounded by the gods. this being the usual practice among Greek dramatists. and some of his works were noted for their spectacular scenic effects. He also designed costumes.7 Aeschylus
7
plot construction.
25
. at age 69. and ﬁgurative turns of speech. Aeschylus is almost unequaled in writing tragedy that. ends. metaphors. and probably acted in most of his own plays. in the intricate architecture of their plots. Aeschylus’s language in both dialogue and choral lyric is marked by force. in joy and reconciliation. as Aristotle says in his Poetics. But his formal innovations account for only part of his achievement. The chronographers recorded Aeschylus’s death at Gela (on Sicily’s south coast) in 456/455. Although the dominance of the chorus in early tragedy is ultimately only hypothesis. Aeschylus nevertheless had a capacity for detached and general thought. but this rich language is ﬁrmly harnessed to the dramatic action rather than used as mere decoration. At Gela he was accorded a public funeral. with sacriﬁces and dramatic performances held at his grave. as in the Oresteia. He made good use of stage settings and stage machinery.

imply steady and distinguished attachment to Athens. which are about all that is known of Sophocles’ life. In total. Sophocles’ major innovation was his introduction of a third actor into the dramatic performance. compared to 13 for Aeschylus. Sophocles won his ﬁrst victory at the Dionysian dramatic festival in 468. Sophocles was a proboulos. and situations could be more complex.e. These few facts. then aged about 83. plots could be more ﬂuid. but the addition of a third actor onstage enabled the dramatist both to increase the number of his characters and widen the variety of their interactions. Ancient authorities credit Sophocles with several major and minor dramatic innovations. and indeed he may have never received lower than second place in the competitions he entered. and social forms. This began a career of unparalleled success and longevity. Sophocles wrote 123 dramas for the festivals. its government. however. The scope of the dramatic conﬂict was thereby extended. Among the latter is his invention of some type of “scene paintings” or other pictorial prop to establish locale or atmosphere.. Sophocles later served as stratēgos perhaps twice again. The typical Sophoclean drama presents a few characters. religion. this means he must have competed about 30 times. assume other roles during a play). defeating the great Aeschylus in the process. It had previously been permissible for two actors to “double” (i. Since each author who was chosen to enter the competition usually presented four plays. He also may have increased the size of the chorus from 12 to 15 members. In 413. one of 10 advisory commissioners who were granted special powers and were entrusted with organizing Athens’s ﬁnancial and domestic recovery after its terrible defeat at Syracuse in Sicily. impressive in their determination and power. Sophocles won perhaps as many as 24 victories.7
Sophocles
7
forces) as a junior colleague of Pericles. and
27
.

His mastery of form and diction was highly respected by his contemporaries. such as Electra and Antigone. those who are to suffer from the tragic error usually are present at the time or belong to the same generation. and he presents truth in collision with ignorance. It was this more complex type of tragedy that demanded a third actor. especially notable are his tragic women. this affects others. Sophocles thus abandoned the spacious Aeschylean framework of the connected trilogy and instead comprised the entire action in a single play. madness). The chief character does something involving grave error.
28
. It can be ponderously weighty or swift-moving. thereby causing the chief agent to take another step toward ruin—his own and that of others as well. the frequent references in the Poetics to Sophocles’ Oedipus the King show that Aristotle regarded this play as a masterpiece of construction. each of whom reacts in his own way. suspenseful situation whose sustained and inexorable onrush came to epitomize the tragic form to the classical world. Few dramatists have been able to handle situation and plot with more power and certainty. false optimism. highly decorative or perfectly plain and simple. and folly. Equally important. Sophocles emphasizes that most people lack wisdom. concentration. delusion. Sophocles’ language responds ﬂexibly to the dramatic needs of the moment. hasty judgment. Sophocles has also been admired for the sympathy and vividness with which he delineates his characters. Sophocles develops his characters’ rush to tragedy with great economy. Many scenes dramatize ﬂaws or failure in thinking (deceptive reports and rumours.7
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possessing a few strongly drawn qualities or faults that combine with a particular set of circumstances to lead them inevitably to a tragic fate. emotionally intense or easygoing. creating a coherent. and few later critics have dissented. and dramatic effectiveness.

he still affectionately praises both his own birthplace and the great city itself.
29
. c. named Pandionis. was to be superseded in turn by the milder and more realistic social satire of the New Comedy. or clan. which appears. He died that same year. c. indeed. and.7 Sophocles
7
Sophocles is also unsurpassed in his moments of high dramatic tension and in his revealing use of tragic irony. and most of the known facts are derived from references in his own plays. the Daitaleis (The Banqueters). Oedipus at Colonus. But Aristophanes belongs to the end of this phase. of the phase of comic dramaturgy in which chorus. Euripides. and the one whose works have been preserved in greatest quantity. which has no choric element at all. He was an Athenian citizen belonging to the deme. which. before the festival of 406. that is. his last extant play. may well be regarded as the only extant specimen of the short-lived Middle Comedy. Little is known about the life of Aristophanes. merciless invective and outrageous satire. Philippus. He is the only extant representative of the Old Comedy. mime. but his actual birthplace is uncertain. owned property on the island of Aegina may have been the cause of an accusation by his fellow citizens that he was not of Athenian birth. 450 BCE—d. In one of his last plays.
ARISTOPHANES
(b. unabashedly licentious humour. and burlesque still played a considerable part and which was characterized by bold fantasy. and a marked freedom of political criticism. before the end of the 4th century BCE. Sophocles’ last recorded act was to lead a chorus in public mourning for his deceased rival.) He began his dramatic career in 427 BCE with a play. (The fact that he or his father. 388 BCE)
A
ristophanes is the greatest representative of ancient Greek comedy.

But it is not easy to say why his comedies still appeal to an audience more than two millennia after they were written. and often degenerate at their end into a series of disconnected and boisterous episodes. This war was essentially a conﬂict between imperialist Athens and conservative Sparta. his generally good-humoured though occasionally malevolent satire. are full of inconsequential episodes. which satirized the litigiousness of the Athenians in
30
. He is thought to have written about 40 plays in all. witticisms. of his comic scenes born of imaginative fantasy. not to say the laughable absurdity. In the matter of plot construction. Aristophanes’ comedies are often loosely put together. at least for audiences of a permissive age. and topical allusions. and philosophical life of Athens itself and with themes provoked by the great Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE). Aristophanes was naturally an opponent of the more or less bellicose statesmen who controlled the government of Athens throughout the better part of his maturity. Among his plays are W asps (422 BCE). and. to have been a satire on his contemporaries’ educational and moral theories. which manage with varying degrees of success to convey the ﬂavour of Aristophanes’ puns. the licentious frankness of many scenes and allusions in his comedies. whose freshness can still be conveyed in languages other than Greek. the ingenuity and inventiveness. literary. and so was long the dominant issue in Athenian politics. Aristophanes’ reputation has stood the test of time. His plays have been frequently produced on the 20th. Aristophanes lived to see the revival of Athens after its defeat by Sparta. A large part of his work is concerned with the social. the brilliance of his parody.7
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from surviving fragments. Aristophanes’ greatness lies in the wittiness of his dialogue. the peculiar charm of his choric songs.and 21stcentury stage in numerous translations. especially when he mocks the controversial tragedian Euripides.

84 BCE. Tibullus. some only possible. Verona. supplemented by inferences drawn from his poems. indecency. and died young. though he preferred to live in Rome and owned a villa near the Roman suburb of Tibur. c. gravity. No ancient biography of Catullus survives. according to the poet Ovid—at the age of 30 as stated by St. and Ovid name him as a poet whose work is familiar to them. Catullus was alive 55–54 BCE on the evidence of four of his poems.7
Aristophanes
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the person of a mean and waspish old man who has a passion for serving on juries. Pompey. on Lake Garda. c. Catullus owned property at Sirmio. Jerome (writing about the end of the 4th century). from which he returned to Sirmio. In a poem externally datable to c. and Julius Caesar. Cisalpine Gaul—d. and farce that marks many of Aristophanes’ plays. Rome)
G
aius Valerius Catullus was a Roman poet whose expressions of love and hatred are generally considered the ﬁnest lyric poetry of ancient Rome. in which the women of Athens seize the Acropolis and the city’s treasury and declare a sex strike until such time as the men will make peace. among whom Horace. 57–56 BCE.
GAIUS VALERIUS CATULLUS
(b. who are variously addressed by him in his poems. 54 BCE. Catullus was thus a contemporary of the statesmen Cicero. Sextus Propertius. A few facts can be pieced together from external sources and in the works of his contemporaries or of later writers. and Lysistrata (411 BCE). the Roman governor of the province. the modern Sirmione. who nevertheless dated his life erroneously 87–57 BCE. Lysistrata achieves a mixture of humour. some of which are certain. in an unfashionable neighbourhood. He preceded the poets of the immediately succeeding age of the emperor Augustus. a journey to Bithynia in Asia Minor in the retinue of Gaius Memmius. His
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. Catullus reports one event.

the death of a brother whose grave he visited in the Troad. Two of them with unusual metre recall Sappho. ranging from the high-spirited to the tedious. especially to his friend Licinius Calvus. as he managed them for lyric purposes. or poem of praise. consisting of an epistle introducing a translation of an elegant conceit by the Alexandrian poet Callimachus. addressing himself to fellow craftsmen (docti. or scholarly poets). or scurrilous conversation.7
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poetry also records two emotional crises. and an intense and unhappy love affair. and four elegiac pieces. In his lifetime. the poet of the Aegean island of Lesbos. directly or indirectly.) His poems also record. as also does his use of the pseudonym Lesbia. is uneven. who is often posthumously commemorated along with him. portrayed variously in 25 poems. one of the three Clodia sisters of Cicero’s foe Publius Clodius Pulcher. and lastly a soliloquy addressed to a friend and cast in the form of an encomium. also in Asia Minor. with a woman who was married and whom he names Lesbia. a homosexual affair with a youth named Juventius. one romantic narrative in hexameters (lines of six feet) on the marriage of Peleus with the sea goddess Thetis. a pseudonym (Ovid states) for Clodia. which spare neither Caesar nor otherwise unknown personalities. according to Plutarch. Catullus was a poet’s poet. followed by a pasquinade. Among his longer poems are two marriage hymns.
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. All three were the subject of scandalous rumour. The quality of his poems of invective. achieved an immediacy that no other classic poet can rival. the 25 Lesbia poems are likely to remain the most memorable. The conversational rhythms of his poetry. (She may have been a patrician. according to the 2nd-century writer Apuleius. For the general reader. between the poet and a door. recording as they do a love that could register ecstasy and despair and all the divided emotions that intervene.

Oct. acquiring a thorough knowledge of Greek and Roman authors. the Aeneid (from c. He was educated at Cremona. His health was never robust. which tells the story of Rome’s legendary founder and proclaims the Roman mission to civilize the world under divine guidance. near Mantua [Italy]—d. crossed the Rubicon. was born of peasant stock. best known for his national epic. and their obscenity reﬂects a serious literary convention that the poet himself defends. the political and military situation in Italy was confused and often calamitous. When Virgil was 20. His fame rests chieﬂy upon the Aeneid. and ﬁnally at Rome. During Virgil’s youth. Andes.
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. at Milan. and receiving a detailed training in rhetoric and philosophy.
VIRGIL
(b. 21. was regarded by the Romans as their greatest poet. especially of the poets. Sept. 70 BCE. Hatred and fear of civil war is powerfully expressed by both Virgil and his contemporary Horace. 19 BCE.
T
Early Life
Virgil. 30 BCE). The civil war between Marius and Sulla had been succeeded by conﬂict between Pompey and Julius Caesar for supreme power.7 Gaius Valerius Catullus
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from the lapidary to the laboured. as the Roman Republic neared its end. But their satiric humour is often effective. Caesar with his armies swooped south from Gaul. whose Latin name was Publius Vergilius Maro. an estimation that subsequent generations have upheld. Brundisium)
he Roman poet Virgil. 15. Virgil’s life was devoted entirely to his poetry and studies connected with it. and began the series of civil wars that were not to end until Augustus’s victory at Actium in 31 BCE.

he gradually won the friendship of many important men in the Roman world. prophesying in sonorous and mystic terms the birth of a child who will bring back the Golden Age. The
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. to some extent. One eclogue in particular stands out as having relevance to the contemporary situation. literary excursions to the idyllic pastoral world of Arcadia based on the Greek poet Theocritus (ﬂ. It is said that he spoke once in the law courts without distinction and that his shy and retiring nature caused him to give up any ideas he might have had of taking part in the world of affairs. Some of them are escapist. presents a vision of world harmony. as his poetry won him fame. banish sin. because it was later regarded as prophetic of Christianity). as a countryman. sister of Octavian. which was. though a speciﬁc occasion may be allocated to the poem. One of the most disastrous effects of the civil wars— and one of which Virgil. It was clearly written at a time when the clouds of civil war seemed to be lifting. it can be dated ﬁrmly to 41–40 BCE. It seems most likely that Virgil refers to an expected child of the triumvir Antony and his wife Octavia. and the ﬁrst half of his life was that of a scholar and near recluse. But. it goes beyond the particular and. in symbolic terms. He never married. and restore peace. But. would be most intensely aware—was the depopulation of rural Italy. c. and this is the fourth (sometimes called the Messianic.
Literary Career
Virgil’s earliest certain work is the Eclogues. a collection of 10 pastoral poems composed between 42 and 37 BCE. It is an elevated poem.7 The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time
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and he played no part in military or political life. destined to be realized under Augustus. 280 BCE) but more unreal and stylized.

Augustus (still known as Octavian) won the ﬁnal battle of the civil wars at Actium against the forces of Antony and Cleopatra. He used his power to establish a period of peace and stability and endeavoured to reawaken in the Romans a sense of national pride and a new enthusiasm for their ancestral religion and their traditional moral values (bravery. felt a deep attachment to the simple virtues and religious traditions of the Italian people. parsimony. All his life he had been preparing himself to write an epic poem (regarded then as the highest form of poetic achievement). like many of his contemporaries. but he was in fact sole ruler of the Roman world. and he now set out to embody his ideal Rome in
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. and his desire to see his beloved Italy restored to its former glories coincided with the national requirement of resettling the land and diminishing the pressure on the cities. but equally it would be wrong to regard his poetry as unconnected with the major currents of political and social needs of the time. The Georgics. felt a great sense of relief that the civil strife was at last over and was deeply grateful to the man who had made it possible. It is dedicated to Maecenas.7 Virgil
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farmers had been obliged to go to war. too. Virgil. is a plea for the restoration of the traditional agricultural life of Italy. who was also the leading patron of the arts. responsibility. By this time Virgil was a member of what might be called the court circle. duty. one of the chief of Augustus’s ministers. It would be wrong to think of Virgil as writing political propaganda. composed between 37 and 30 BCE (the ﬁnal period of the civil wars). and family devotion). and their farms fell into neglect and ruin as a result. In the year 31 BCE. Virgil was personally committed to the same ideals as the government. Augustus was anxious to preserve the traditions of the republic and its constitutional forms. Virgil. when Virgil was 38.

in the fourth book she wins so much sympathy that the reader wonders whether Rome should be bought at this price. The real greatness of the Aeneid is due to Virgil’s awareness of the private. the only character to be created by a Roman poet that has passed into world literature—is Dido. at his death. The Aeneid occupied Virgil for 11 years and. The theme he chose gave him two great advantages. she could have been presented in such a way that Aeneas’s rejection of her would have been a victory to applaud. Queen of Carthage. by the use of prophecies and visions and devices such as the description of the pictures on Aeneas’s shield or of the origins of contemporary customs and institutions. he set out for Greece—doubtless to obtain local colour for the revision of those parts of the Aeneid set in Greek waters. had not yet received its ﬁnal revision. from which Rome was to spring. The most memorable ﬁgure in the poem—and. so that Virgil could remodel episodes and characters from his great Greek predecessor. The Aeneid is no panegyric. it has been said. planning to spend a further three years on his poem. opponent of the Roman way of life. In a mere panegyric of Rome. One was that its date and subject were very close to those of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. by an exiled Trojan prince after the destruction of Troy by the Greeks in the 12th century BCE. aspects of human life.7
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the Aeneid. it could foreshadow the real events of Roman history. Moreover. The other was that it could be brought into relationship with his contemporary Augustan world by presenting Aeneas as the prototype of the Roman way of life (the last of the Trojans and the ﬁrst of the Romans). the story of the foundation of the ﬁrst settlement in Italy. In fact. as well as the public. it sets the achievements and aspirations of the giant organization of Roman governmental rule in tension with the frustrated hopes and sufferings of individuals.
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. In 19 BCE.

the Aeneid. allowed Virgil to honour his beloved city of Rome. Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images 37
. and achieve his goal of writing an epic poem.7 Virgil
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Writing his famous work. express his views of events unfolding around him.

He is the author of one of the seven odes in the famed collection of preIslamic poetry Al-Mu‘allaqāt.ārith of Ghassān (northern Arabia). but the predominant legend cites Imru’ al-Qays as the youngest son of ujr. but. He successfully attacked and routed the Banū Asad. The philologists of the Basra school regarded Imru’ alQays not only as the greatest of the poets of the Mu‘allaqāt
T
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. c. Legend has it that on his return to Arabia the emperor sent him a poisoned cloak. which caused his death at Ancyra (modern Ankara). 500 CE)
he Arab poet Imru’ al-Qays was acknowledged as the most distinguished poet of pre-Islamic times by the Prophet Muhammad. Imru’ al-Qays was single-minded in his pursuit of revenge. The story goes that Virgil’s dying wish was for his poem to be burned. the Banū Asad. and he assumed the life of a vagabond. he went from tribe to tribe fruitlessly seeking further help. but that this request was countermanded by the order of Augustus. and by Arab critics of the ancient Basra school. There is no agreement as to his genealogy. the last king of Kindah. He was twice expelled from his father’s court for the erotic poetry he was fond of writing. by ‘Alī. Imru’ al-Qays was introduced to the Byzantine emperor Justinian I. After his father was murdered by a rebel Bedouin tribe. the fourth caliph. Through King al.
IMRU’ AL-QAYS
(d. who agreed to supply him with the troops that he needed to regain his kingdom.7
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On the voyage he caught a fever and returned to Italy but died soon after arrival at Brundisium. unsatisﬁed. Whether the Aeneid would have undergone major changes cannot be guessed.

or qa īdah. and of many of its conventions. is doubtful. The authenticity of the greater part of them. however. Hunan province)
D
u Fu is considered by many literary critics to be the greatest Chinese poet of all time. 712. Born into a scholarly family. such as the poet’s weeping over the traces of deserted campsites. he spent much of his youth traveling. He never again
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. you two companions. rivaled in that designation only by his contemporary Li Bai. including the great Li Bai. on a riverboat between Danzhou [now Changsha] and Yueyang. The opening of the long qa īdah by Imru’ al-Qays that appears in the Mu‘allaqāt is perhaps the best-known line of poetry in Arabic: “Halt. Du Fu returned to the capital and to the conventional Confucianism of his youth. After a brief ﬂirtation with Daoism while traveling with Li Bai. Du Fu received a traditional Confucian education but failed in the imperial examinations of 735. During his travels he won renown as a poet and met other poets of the period.
DU FU
(b.” The hunting scenes and bluntly erotic narratives by Imru’ al-Qays in the Mu‘allaqāt represent important early precedents of the genres of hunt poetry and love poetry in Arabic literature. 770. and let us weep for the memory of a beloved and an abode mid the sand-dunes between Al-Dakhūl and awmal.7 Imru’ al-Qays 7
but also as the inventor of the form of the classical ode. numbering as many as 68 poems. the unofﬁcial poet laureate to the military expedition of Prince Lin. Henan province. who was arrested when the prince was accused of intending to establish an independent kingdom and was executed. There were at least three collections (divans) of his poetry made by medieval Arab scholars. Gongxian. As a result. China—d.

even though he was without money and ofﬁcial position himself and failed a second time in an imperial examination. He soon began to write bitingly of war—seen in Bingqu xing (The Ballad of the Army Carts).7
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met Li Bai. Wandering about until the mid760s. Du Fu’s early poetry celebrated the beauty of the natural world and bemoaned the passage of time. being given the position of censor. Du Fu experienced extreme personal hardships. as in Liren xing (The Beautiful Woman). Popular legend attributes his death (on a riverboat on the Xiang River) to overindulgence in food and wine after a 10-day fast. Between 751 and 755 he tried to attract imperial attention by submitting a succession of literary products that were couched in a language of ornamental ﬂattery. probably in 741. despite his strong admiration for his freewheeling contemporary. He escaped them. During the 740s Du Fu was a well-regarded member of a group of high ofﬁcials. and especially during the tumultuous period of 755 to 759. Du Fu’s paramount position in the history of Chinese literature rests on his superb classicism. he was eventually relieved of his post and endured another period of poverty and hunger. however. and in 757 joined the exiled court. His memoranda to the emperor do not appear to have been particularly welcome. As he matured. he brieﬂy served a local warlord. during An Lushan’s rebellion. a poem about conscription—and with hidden satire. He was highly
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. which speaks of the conspicuous luxury of the court. but in 768 he again started traveling aimlessly toward the south. He married. his verse began to sound a note of profound compassion for humanity caught in the grip of senseless war. a position that enabled him to acquire some land and to become a gentleman farmer. a device that eventually resulted in a nominal position at court. In 755.

He began to write panegyrics in the tradition established by the poets Abū Tammām and al-Bu turī. His dense. near Dayr al. qualities that no translation can ever reveal. compressed language makes use of all the connotative overtones of a phrase and of all the intonational potentials of the individual word. primarily wrote panegyrics in a ﬂowery. Iraq—d. He was an expert in all poetic genres current in his day. he joined them and lived among the Bedouin. A panegyric on the military victories of Sayf al-Dawlah. al-Mutanabbī lauded his patron in panegyrics that rank as masterpieces of Arabic poetry. After its suppression and two years’ imprisonment.7
Du Fu
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erudite. or “regulated verse. 915. When Shī’ite Qarmatians sacked Kūfah in 924. Al-Mutanabbī was the son of a water carrier who claimed noble and ancient southern Arabian descent. he recanted in 935 and became a wandering poet.
A
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. Because of his poetic talent. Claiming to be a prophet— hence the name al-Mutanabbī (“The Would-Be Prophet”)—he led a Qarmatian revolt in Syria in 932. the amdānid poet-prince of northern Syria. al-Mutanabbī received an education. resulted in al-Mutanabbī’s attaching himself to the ruler’s court in 948. Sept. bombastic. but his mastery was at its height in the lüshi. learning their doctrines and Arabic. 965. Kūfah.‘Āqūl)
l-Mutanabbī.
AL-MUTANABBI ¯
(b. and highly inﬂuential style marked by improbable metaphors.” which he reﬁned to a point of glowing intensity. During his time there. and his intimate acquaintance with the literary tradition of the past was equaled only by his complete ease in handling the rules of prosody. 23. regarded by many as the greatest poet of the Arabic language.

Iran—d. ūs)
F
erdowsī was a Persian poet who gave to the Shāh-nāmeh (“Book of Kings”). He was born in a village on the outskirts of the ancient city of ūs. c. He gave to the traditional qa īdah. But he offended Kāfūr by lampooning him in scurrilous satirical poems and ﬂed Egypt about 960. c. Al-Mutanabbī’s pride and arrogance set the tone for much of his verse. its ﬁnal and enduring form. In the course of the centuries many legends
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. a freer and more personal development. the Ethiopian eunuch Abū al-Misk Kāfūr. previously it was extinguished / As though the lack of it in a body were a kind of disease. After further travels—including to Baghdad.” The latter part of this period was clouded with intrigues and jealousies that culminated in al-Mutanabbī’s leaving Syria in 957 for Egypt. who had been born a slave. or ode. where he was unable to secure patronage. Al-Mutanabbī attached himself to the regent. then ruled in name by the Ikhshīdids. near ūs. writing in what can be called a neoclassical style that combined some elements of Iraqi and Syrian stylistics with classical features. and to Kūfah. when he returned to Iraq and was killed by bandits near Baghdad. which is ornately rhetorical yet crafted with consummate skill and artistry.7
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Among his lines of praise for Sayf al-Dawlah are ones written after the prince’s recovery from illness: “Light is now returned to the sun. Iran. under the protection of the emir ‘A ūd al-Dawlah of the Būyid dynasty until 965.
¯ FERDOWSI
(b. 935. the Persian national epic. where he again defended the city from attack by the Qarmatians— al-Mutanabbī lived in Shīrāz. 1020–26.

He had only one child.000 verses. a poet at the court of the Sāmānids.7 Ferdows
7
have been woven around the poet’s name—which is itself the pseudonym of Abū al-Qasem Man ūr—but very little else. It also contained additional material continuing the story to the overthrow of the Sāsānians by the Arabs in the middle of the 7th century. ﬁnally completed in 1010. deriving a comfortable income from his estates. other than his birthplace. The ﬁrst to undertake the versiﬁcation of this chronicle of pre-Islāmic and legendary Persia was Daqīqī. with due acknowledgements. Ferdowsī came to Ghazna in person and
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. Ferdowsī was a dehqān (“landowner”). Information on the relations between poet and patron is largely legendary. a poem of nearly 60. and it was to provide her with a dowry that he set his hand to the task that was to occupy him for 35 years. a daughter. is known about the real facts of his life. were afterward incorporated by Ferdowsī. the Khvatāy-nāmak. a 12th-century poet who visited Ferdowsī’s tomb in 1116 or 1117 and collected the traditions that were current in his birthplace less than a century after his death. These verses. who by that time had made himself master of Ferdowsī’s homeland. The Shāh-nāmeh of Ferdowsī. The Shāh-nāmeh. Khūrāsān. According to Ne āmī-ye ‘Arū ī. a history of the kings of Persia from mythical times down to the reign of Khosrow II (590–628). The only reliable source is given by Ne āmī-ye ‘Arū ī. was presented to the celebrated sultan Ma mūd of Ghazna. which deal with the rise of the prophet Zoroaster. This prose Shāh-nāmeh was in turn and for the most part the translation of a Pahlavi (Middle Persian) work.000 couplets. According to Ne āmī. is based mainly on a prose work of the same name compiled in the poet’s early manhood in his native ūs. in his own poem. who came to a violent end after completing only 1.

an epic poem on the subject of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. The whole text of this satire.000 dirhams. which. was too much. where he was in hiding for six months. persuaded him to leave the dedication to Ma mūd. Fearing the Sultan’s wrath. bearing every mark of authenticity. as a descendant of the ancient kings of Persia. has survived to the present. bought a draft of foqā‘ (a kind of beer) and divided the whole of the money between the bath attendant and the seller of foqā‘. and had it expunged from the poem.000 dirhams a verse. on coming out. it later became known. There Ferdowsī composed a satire of 100 verses on Sultan Ma mūd that he inserted in the preface of the Shāh-nāmeh and read it to Shahreyār. and then. whose family claimed descent from the last of the Sāsānians. a bigoted Sunnite. bought the satire from him for 1.7
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through the good ofﬁces of the minister A mad ebn asan Meymandī was able to secure the Sultan’s acceptance of the poem. They suggested that Ferdowsī should be given 50. he went to the bath and. Unfortunately. and in the end Ferdowsī received only 20. by way of his native ūs. they said. Ma mūd then consulted certain enemies of the minister as to the poet’s reward. to Mazanderan. instead of to Ma mūd. It was long supposed that in his old age the poet had spent some time in western Persia or even in Baghdad under the protection of the Būyids. Bitterly disappointed. was inﬂuenced by their words. he ﬂed ﬁrst to Herāt. Ferdowsī died inopportunely just
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. however. but this assumption was based upon his presumed authorship of Yūsof o-Zalīkhā. where he found refuge at the court of the Sepahbād Shahreyār. was composed more than 100 years after Ferdowsī’s death. at the same time offering to dedicate the poem to him.000 dirhams. and even this. Shahreyār. Ma mūd. in view of his heretical Shī’īte tenets. According to the narrative of Ne āmī-ye ‘Arū ī.

c. the Shāh-nāmeh.7 Ferdows
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as Sultan Ma mūd had determined to make amends for his shabby treatment of the poet by sending him 60. preserved for all time in sonorous and majestic verse. it is conjectured that she acquired the sobriquet of Murasaki from the name of the heroine of her novel. European scholars have criticized this enormous poem for what they have regarded as its monotonous metre. in which the Persian national epic found its ﬁnal and enduring form. c. The main source of knowledge about her life is the diary she kept between 1007 and 1010. it is certain that he lived to be more than 80. but to the Iranian it is the history of his country’s glorious past. modern Iranian as the King James version of the Bible is to a modern English-speaker. based as the poem is on a Pahlavi original. The Persians regard Ferdowsī as the greatest of their poets. this work is as intelligible to the average.000 dinars’ worth of indigo. however. Though written about 1. Ne āmī does not mention the date of Ferdowsī’s death. This work possesses
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. Kyōto. 1014. Kyōto)
M
urasaki Shikibu is the name that has been given to the court lady who was the author of the Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji). 978. Japan—d. Her real name. For nearly a thousand years they have continued to read and to listen to recitations from his masterwork. generally considered the greatest work of Japanese literature and thought to be the world’s oldest full novel.
MURASAKI SHIKIBU
(b. its constant repetitions.000 years ago. is unknown. is pure Persian with only the slightest admixture of Arabic. The language. The earliest date given by later authorities is 1020 and the latest 1026. and its stereotyped similes.

The translation (1935) of The Tale of Genji by Arthur Waley is a classic of English literature. it is permeated with a sensitivity to human emotions and to the beauties of nature hardly paralleled elsewhere. whom Murasaki Shikibu served. Much of it is concerned with the loves of Prince Genji and the different women in his life. More probably. which widely inﬂuenced mystical thought and literature
al-Dīn mystic in J alāl PersianRūmī. Murasaki Shikibu’s diary is included in Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan (1935). when she began serving at court. theisgreatest Suﬁhis lyricsand poethis the language. The Tale of Genji captures the image of a unique society of ultrareﬁned and elegant aristocrats. Although the novel does not contain scenes of powerful action. 1207. famous for and for
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. all of whom are exquisitely delineated.
¯ ¯ RUMI
(b. music. 30. Some critics believe that she wrote the entire Tale of Genji between 1001 (the year her husband. whose indispensable accomplishments were skill in poetry. believe that its last 14 chapters were written by another author. Some. calligraphy. and courtship. the composition of this extremely long and complex novel extended over a much greater period and was not ﬁnished until about 1010. 17. Sept. indicating perhaps a deepening of Murasaki Shikibu’s Buddhist conviction of the vanity of the world. The tone of the novel darkens as it progresses. Fujiwara Nobutaka. died) and 1005.7
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considerable interest for the delightful glimpses it affords of life at the court of the empress Jōtō mon’in. however. Balkh [now in Afghanistan]—d. c. however. translated by Annie Shepley Ōmori and Kōchi Doi. 1273)
didactic epic Ma navī-yi Ma‘navī (“Spiritual Couplets”). Dec.

the leading Islamic theosophist whose interpreter and stepson. one of Bahā’ al-Dīn’s former disciples. left Konya about 1240. Burhān al-Dīn Mu aqqiq. Iran. was a noted mystical theologian. 1244. Bahā’ al-Dīn Walad. when in the streets of Konya he met the wandering dervish—holy man—Shams al-Dīn (Sun of Religion)
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. where Jalāl al-Dīn’s mother died and his ﬁrst son was born. The decisive moment in Rūmī’s life occurred on Nov. After a short stay at Laranda (Karaman). Here. A year later. who contributed considerably to Jalāl al-Dīn’s spiritual formation. hence the surname Rūmī). who blessed young Jalāl al-Dīn. Konya. was Jalāl al-Dīn’s colleague and friend in Konya. in Nīshāpūr. Burhān al-Dīn. After a pilgrimage to Mecca and journeys through the Middle East. a region that enjoyed peace and prosperity under the rule of the Turkish Seljuq dynasty. after his death in 1231 he was succeeded in this capacity by his son. 30. adr al-Dīn al-Qunawī. and teacher. his disciples were organized as the Mawlawīyah order. a Persian mystical poet. After his death. Jalāl al-Dīn’s father. Bahā’ al-Dīn and his family reached Anatolia (Rūm. in 1228. author. there he may have met Ibn al-‘Arabī. Bahā’ al-Dīn Walad taught at one of the numerous madrasahs (religious schools). Bahā’ al-Dīn and his family left their native town in about 1218.7
R m
7
throughout the Muslim world. According to legend. the family met Farīd al-Dīn ‘A ār. arrived in Konya and acquainted Jalāl al-Dīn more deeply with some mystical theories that had developed in Iran. they were called to the capital. Jalāl al-Dīn is said to have undertaken one or two journeys to Syria (unless his contacts with Syrian Suﬁ circles were already established before his family reached Anatolia). Because of either a dispute with the ruler or the threat of the approaching Mongols.

however. The family. There would seem to be cause for the belief. radiant like the moon. propelled by its strong rhythms. His overwhelming personality. sometimes assumes forms close to popular verses. where Rūmī used to go with his disciples to enjoy nature. The fresh language. however. expressed by chroniclers. He found in nature the reﬂection of the
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. and loss turned Rūmī into a poet. his eldest son. that much of this poetry was composed in a state of ecstasy. This experience of love. the hammering of the goldsmiths.000 verses) and a large number of robā‘īyāt (“quatrains”)—reﬂect the different stages of his love. “he found Shams in himself. not without the knowledge of Rūmī’s sons. His poems—ghazals (about 30. could not tolerate the close relation of Jalāl al-Dīn with his beloved. and Rūmī neglected his disciples and family so that his scandalized entourage forced Shams to leave the town in February 1246. never becomes lost in lofty spiritual heights or nebulous speculation. however. induced by the music of the ﬂute or the drum. longing. The Dīvān-e Shams (“The Collected Poetry of Shams”) is a true translation of his experiences into poetry. as his son writes. who hurriedly buried him close to a well that is still extant in Konya. whom he may have ﬁrst encountered in Syria. and one night in 1247 Shams disappeared forever. its language. Shams al-Dīn cannot be connected with any of the traditional mystical fraternities. For months the two mystics lived closely together. or the sound of the water mill in Meram.” The complete identiﬁcation of lover and beloved is expressed by his inserting the name of Shams instead of his own pen name at the end of most of his lyrical poems.7 The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time
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of Tabrīz. revealed to Jalāl al-Dīn the mysteries of divine majesty and beauty. until. eventually brought Shams back from Syria. Jalāl al-Dīn was heartbroken. In the 20th century it was established that Shams was indeed murdered. Sul ān Walad.

and allegories. the allembracing light. and many of his poems were composed to be sung in Suﬁ musical gatherings. accompanied by usām al-Dīn. hearing the sound of a hammer in front of alā al-Dīn’s shop in the bazaar of Konya. A few years after Shams al-Dīn’s death. both alā al-Dīn and usām al-Dīn were. who wrote them down. Rūmī experienced a similar rapture in his acquaintance with an illiterate goldsmith. Rūmī’s main work. He often accompanied his verses by a whirling dance. was composed under his inﬂuence. The Ma navī shows all the different aspects of Suﬁsm in the 13th century. After ālā al-Dīn’s death. ālā al-Dīn Zarkūb. for Rūmī.000 couplets of the Ma navī during the following years. proverbs. and his company was sought by the leading ofﬁcials as well as by Christian monks. The shop owner had long been one of Rūmī’s closest and most loyal disciples. He always remained a respected member of Konya society. stories. Their works were widely read by the mystics and by Rūmī’s disciples. Rūmī began his dance. usām al-Dīn was his successor and was in turn succeeded by Sul ān
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. fables. renewed manifestations of Shams al-Dīn. the Ma navī-yi Ma‘navī.7
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radiant beauty of the Sun of Religion and felt ﬂowers and birds partaking in his love. Rūmī followed usām al-Dīn’s advice and composed nearly 26. interspersed with anecdotes. Rūmī lived for a short while after completing the Ma navī. It is said that one day. and it reﬂects the experience of divine love. It is said that he would recite his verses even in the bath or on the roads. usām al-Dīn had asked him to follow the model of the poets ‘A ār and Sanā’i. usām al-Dīn Chelebi became his spiritual love and deputy. who had laid down mystical teachings in long poems. and his daughter became the wife of Rūmī’s eldest son. This love again inspired Rūmī to write poetry.

later named La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy). prose writer. today a museum in Konya. Florence. 13/14. respectively.
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. Again failing to appear some weeks later. Dante and others within his party were condemned to be burned to death. Italy—d. known in the West as the Whirling Dervishes because of the mystical dance that constitutes their principal ritual. the Green Dome. His great friendship with the poet Guido Cavalcanti shaped Dante’s later career. is still a place of pilgrimage for thousands of all faiths from around the world. was condemned for crimes he had not committed. 1321.
DANTE
(b. literary theorist. moral philosopher. however. c. May 21–June 20. and political thinker who is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia. More important. When an opposing political faction within the Guelfs (Dante’s party) gained ascendancy in Florence. Sul ān Walad’s poetical accounts of his father’s life are the most important source of knowledge of Rūmī’s spiritual development. Guelfs and Ghibellines.7
R m
7
Walad. failing to do so. Ravenna)
D
ante Alighieri was an Italian poet. 1265.
Public Career and Exile
Dante was of noble ancestry. Sept. His mausoleum. and his life was shaped by the conﬂict between the papal and imperial partisans called. who organized the loose fraternity of Rūmī’s disciples into the Mawlawīyah. He soon after went into exile and never again returned to Florence. he was called in January 1302 to appear before the new government and.

is a ﬁnely crafted rumination on humankind’s existence on Earth and what lies beyond death. The New Life) tells a simple story: Dante’s ﬁrst sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age. the crisis experienced when Beatrice withholds her greeting. anticipations of her death.
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. her salutation when they are 18. a ﬁgure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated ﬁctionalized women in all of literature. 1293. Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her. Dante’s mourning. and ﬁnally the death of Beatrice. and purgatory. his determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues. Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him. David Lees/ Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
was Beatrice. the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice). La vita nuova (c. hell. an imagined journey through heaven.7
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Italian Renaissance poet Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.

In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems composed over about a 10-year period. Through the Convivio Dante felt able to explain the chaos into which Italy had been plunged. a companion piece to the
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. During this time Dante also began work on the unﬁnished De vulgari eloquentia (c. Each is a prosimetrum. the other being the Il convivio (c. in hopes of remedying these conditions.7 Dante
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Beatrice’s ﬁnal triumph and apotheosis. contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The Divine Comedy. of the Roman Empire. a bulkier and more ambitious work. Vita nuova is the ﬁrst of two collections of verse that Dante made in his lifetime. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93. a work composed of verse and prose. more speciﬁcally. requires proper education through examples and doctrine. The Convivio was among the works he wrote during his difﬁcult years of exile. Concerning Vernacular Eloquence). the Vita nuova is strangely impersonal. The soul. however. in the last chapter. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical identity of Beatrice).” Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose. Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has never been written of any woman. the Convivio. of an innate desire that prompts the soul to return to God. He introduces the crucial concept of horme. 1304–07. otherwise it can become misdirected toward worldly aims and society torn apart by its destructive power. to take up the epic task of The Divine Comedy. and. that is. He makes his ﬁrst stirring defense of the imperial tradition and. In it Dante’s mature political and philosophical system is nearly complete. that is. The Banquet). and it moved him. 1304–07.

The exile of an individual becomes a microcosm of the problems of a country. The Divine Comedy consists of 100 cantos. who introduces him to Paradiso. and Beatrice. De monarchia (c. He has two guides: Virgil. The Divine Comedy was possibly begun prior to 1308 and completed just before his death in 1321. or canticles. Purgatory. etc. The poem’s plot can be summarized as follows: a man. There are 33 cantos in each canticle and one additional canto. is miraculously enabled to undertake a journey that leads him to visit the souls in Hell. but the exact dates are uncertain.
The Divine Comedy
Dante’s years of exile were years of difﬁcult peregrinations from one place to another. which are grouped together into three sections. bcb. Throughout his exile he nevertheless was sustained by work on his great poem. The poem’s rhyme scheme is the terza rima (aba. and it also becomes representative of the Fall of Man. and Paradise. contained in the Inferno. one of Dante’s greatest polemical treatises. written in Latin. who leads him through the Inferno and Purgatorio. which serves as an introduction to the entire poem. Through these ﬁctional encounters taking place from Good Friday evening in 1300 through Easter Sunday and slightly beyond. Inferno. it is primarily a practical treatise in the art of poetry based upon an elevated poetic language and is one of the ﬁrst great Renaissance defenses of vernacular Italian. of course. already occurred at the time of the writing). For the most part the cantos range from about 136 to about 151 lines. cdc. Dante learns of the exile that is awaiting him (which had.). Purgatorio.
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. and Paradiso. generally assumed to be Dante himself. 1313. expands the political arguments of the Convivio. On Monarchy).7
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Convivio.

Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a life of the poet and then in 1373–74 delivered the ﬁrst public lectures on The Divine Comedy. His poems addressed to Laura. Dante was given an honourable burial attended by the leading men of letters of the time. Dante became known as the divino poeta. In his ﬁnal years Dante was received honourably in many noble houses in the north of Italy. July 20. Tuscany [Italy]—d. By writing it in Italian rather than Latin. July 18/19. the simple Commedia became La divina commedia. Petrarch. at his death. and at
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. 1304. most notably by Guido Novello da Polenta. Dante almost singlehandedly made Italian a literary language. undertook his ﬁrst studies at Carpentras. or The Divine Comedy. and in an edition of his great poem published in Venice in 1555 the adjective was applied to the poem’s title. Carrara)
Petrarch. France. in Ravenna. an idealized beloved. an Italian poet and humanist. was regarded as the greatest scholar of his age. near Padua. Arquà. and the funeral oration was delivered by Guido himself. whose Italian name was Francesco Petrarca. and his consciousness of the Classical past as a source of literary and philosophical meaning for the present was of great importance in paving the way for the Renaissance. making Dante the ﬁrst of the moderns whose work found its place with the ancient classics in a university course.7
Dante
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The Divine Comedy is a profoundly Christian vision of human temporal and eternal destiny. There. the nephew of the remarkable Francesca. thus. By the year 1400 no fewer than 12 commentaries devoted to detailed expositions of its meaning had appeared. 1374. Arezzo. contributed to the Renaissance ﬂowering of lyric poetry.
PETRARCH
(b.

in 1326. which he affected to despise as mere triﬂes in the vulgar tongue but which he collected and revised throughout his life. There now followed the reaction—a period of dissipation—which also coincided with the beginning of his famous chaste love for a woman known now only as Laura. afterward placing his laurel wreath on the tomb of the Apostle in St. Peter’s Basilica. in the jubilee year of 1350 he made a pilgrimage to Rome and later
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. and travel. known as the Black Death. and loved her. Petrarch’s reputation as a scholar spread. saw many friends fall victim. From there he returned to Italy with his younger brother Gherardo to continue these studies at Bologna (1320). He ﬁrst saw her in the Church of St.7
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his father’s insistence he was sent to study law at Montpellier. the Italian poems (Rime). Finally. The Plague of 1348. the anniversary of Petrarch’s ﬁrst seeing her. unremitting study. He subsequently became enthusiastic for the efforts of Cola di Rienzo to revive the Roman republic and restore popular government in Rome—a sympathy that divided him still more sharply from the Avignon court and in 1346 even led to the loss of Cardinal Colonna’s friendship. France (1316). During the 1330s. 1327. almost until his death. who died on April 6. including Laura. He was crowned as poet on the Capitoline Hill on April 8. 1341. Petrarch himself kept silent about everything concerning her civil status. a symbolic gesture linking the Classical tradition with the Christian message. Petrarch took minor ecclesiastical orders at Avignon and entered the household of the inﬂuential cardinal Giovanni Colonna. From this love there springs the work for which he is most celebrated. although she was outside his reach. After his father’s death. Clare at Avignon on April 6. Petrarch had during his early youth a deep religious faith and a love of virtue. which were years of ambition.

dividing his time from 1370 between Padua and Arquà. De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia. which rejected the prevailing Aristotelianism of the schools and restored the spiritual worth of Classical writers. He also continued work on the Epistolae metricae (66 “letters” in Latin hexameter verses).7 Petrarch
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assigned to this year his renunciation of sensual pleasures. study. where he had a little house. an autobiographical letter to posterity that was to have formed the conclusion to his Seniles. which he had begun writing two decades earlier. he also composed the ﬁnal sections of the Trionﬁ. his head resting on a manuscript of Virgil. his love for Laura. he did not stop working. in the neighbouring Euganean hills. Despite suffering a stroke in 1370. Petrarch found himself in Padua in 1367. There he wrote the defense of his humanism. he composed more minor works and added new sections to his Posteritati. The theme of his Canzoniere (as the poems are usually known) therefore goes beyond the apparent subject matter. The time in between these landmark events was ﬁlled with diplomatic missions. in addition to revisions. The project was divided into two parts: the Rime in vita di Laura (“Poems During Laura’s Life”) and the Rime in morte di Laura (“Poems After Laura’s Death”). He also began work on his poem Trionﬁ. Petrarch died while working in his study at Arquà and was found the next morning. he embarked on a polemic against the conservative enemies of his new conception of education. begun in 1350. After a number of moves and intense work on the deﬁnitive versions of his various writings. He was still in great demand as a diplomat. which he now selected and arranged to illustrate the story of his own spiritual growth. In 1351 he began work on a new plan for the Rime. He remained there until his death. and immense literary activity. a generalized version of the story of the human soul in its progress from earthly passion toward fulﬁllment in God.
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.

countess of Ulster. 25. Chaucer also contributed importantly in the second half of the 14th century to the management of public affairs as courtier. both about the same age. London)
he Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. His ﬁrst important poem. were present at the countess of Ulster’s residence in Yorkshire. diplomat. as a member of the household of Elizabeth. Oct. Chaucer’s close relationship with John. third son of Edward III. c. That poem of more than 1. probably written in late 1369 or early 1370.
T
Early Years
Chaucer ﬁrst appears in the records in 1357. a genre made popular by the highly inﬂuential 13th-century French poem of courtly love. 1400. ranks as one of the greatest poetic works in English. Chaucer’s career was prospering at this time.300 lines. John of Gaunt’s ﬁrst wife.7
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GEOFFREY CHAUCER
(b. and civil servant. But it is his avocation—the writing of poetry—for which he is remembered. is an elegy for Blanche. Book of the Duchess. may have commenced as early as Christmas 1357 when they. and he borrowed from it throughout his poetic career. the outstanding English poet before Shakespeare. duchess of Lancaster.—d. is among the records that provide evidence of his connection with people in high places. London?. who died of plague in September 1369. the Roman de la rose. Chaucer used the dream-vision form. wife of Lionel. Chaucer translated that poem. at least in part. probably as one of his ﬁrst literary efforts. 1342/43. For this ﬁrst of his important poems. Eng. The
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. which continued through most of his life. and by 1366 Chaucer had married. By 1359 Chaucer was a member of Edward III’s army in France and was captured during the unsuccessful siege of Reims.

which was later to have profound inﬂuence upon his own writing. Yet he produced a sizable body of writings during this decade. a poem of more than 2. however. Chaucer also translated the Consolation of Philosophy. In addition to its comic aspects. So much responsibility and activity in public matters appears to have left Chaucer little time for writing during this decade. he encountered the work of Dante. Valentine’s Day. and Italy. the poem seems to convey a serious note: like all earthly things.7 Geoffrey Chaucer
7
Duchess is also indebted to contemporary French poetry and to Ovid.000 lines. during his missions to Italy. must have kept Chaucer steadily anxious. some of very high order. a playfully humorous poem of 699 lines. In some ways it is a failure—it is unﬁnished. During the 1370s. The great literary event for him was that. from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 through the Merciless Parliament of 1388. and Boccaccio. The Parlement of Foules. also in dream-vision form. Petrarch. France.
The Middle Years
Political events of the 1380s. its theme is unclear. written by
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. Chaucer’s most important work of the 1370s was Hous of Fame. and the diversity of its parts seems to overshadow any unity of purpose—but it gives considerable evidence of Chaucer’s advancing skill as a poet. Chaucer’s favourite Roman poet. Nothing in these borrowings. making use of the myth that each year on that day the birds gathered before the goddess Nature to choose their mates. will account for his originality in combining dream-vision with elegy and eulogy of Blanche with consolation for John. combined with his wife’s apparent death in 1387. His career as a diplomat and civil servant was ﬂourishing. is a dream-vision for St. Chaucer was at various times on diplomatic missions in Flanders. fame is transitory and capricious.

239-line poem from Boccaccio’s Filostrato. Harry Bailly. In his next poem. Its discussion of free will. and agree to engage in a storytelling contest as they travel on horseback to the shrine of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury.7
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the Roman philosopher Boethius (early 6th century). The
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. Kent. destiny. the inﬂuence of Boethius’s book is pervasive. serves as master of ceremonies for the contest. Chaucer took the basic plot for this 8.
Last Years and The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer’s great literary accomplishment of the 1390s was The Canterbury Tales. the love story of Troilus. The Legend of Good Women. In it a group of about 30 pilgrims gather at the Tabard Inn in Southwark. host of the Tabard. one of the most inﬂuential of medieval books. God’s foreknowledge. Also in the 1380s. greater even than the far more widely read Canterbury Tales. Seemingly the static nature of the framing device for the Legend and the repetitive aspect of the series of stories with a single theme led him to give up this attempt as a poor job. Perhaps the most important fact about the Legend is that it shows Chaucer structuring a long poem as a collection of stories within a framework. Some critics consider Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer’s ﬁnest work. widowed daughter of the deserter priest Calkas. Against the background of the legendary Trojan War. The poem moves in leisurely fashion. and true and false happiness had a deep and lasting effect upon Chaucer’s thought and art. with introspection and psychological insight dominating many sections. son of the Trojan king Priam. across the Thames from London. fortune. and back. Chaucer produced his fourth and ﬁnal dream-vision poem. and Criseyde. Troilus and Criseyde. But the two works are so different that comparative evaluation seems fruitless. is recounted.

the links. On that note he ends his ﬁnest work and his career as poet.
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. prevented him from completing the full plan for his book. and some of the pilgrims do not tell stories. Further. Chaucer the civil servant. Chaucer’s death. the return journey from Canterbury is not included. Because of this structure. and the tales all fuse as complex presentations of the pilgrims. plus two expositions in prose. while at the same time the tales present remarkable examples of short stories in verse. The work is nevertheless sufﬁciently complete to be considered a uniﬁed book rather than a collection of unﬁnished fragments. Interspersed between the 24 tales told by the pilgrims are short dramatic scenes presenting lively exchanges. somewhat slow-witted in his pose and always intrigued by human frailty but always questioning the complexity of the human condition and always seeing both the humour and the tragedy in that condition. in the Retractation with which The Canterbury Tales closes. and Chaucer the pilgrim. the surviving manuscripts leave room for doubt at some points as to Chaucer’s intent for arranging the material. At the end. in 1400. Chaucer as poet and pilgrim states his conclusion that the concern for this world fades into insigniﬁcance before the prospect for the next. Use of a pilgrimage as a framing device for the collection of stories enabled Chaucer to bring together people from many walks of life. Over the expanse of this intricate dramatic narrative. called links and usually involving the host and one or more of the pilgrims.7 Geoffrey Chaucer
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pilgrims are introduced by vivid brief sketches in the General Prologue. he asks forgiveness for his writings that concern “worldly vanities” and remembrance for his translation of the Consolation and his other works of morality and religious devotion. In view of the admonitions in The Parson’s Tale. the sketches. and the storytelling contest allowed presentation of a highly varied collection of literary genres. he presides as Chaucer the poet.

for that matter. Lisbon. probably in recompense for both his service in India and his having written Os Lusíadas. c. June 10. Camões was born in Lisbon when Portuguese expansion in the East was at its peak. It is impossible to say for certain when he decided to do so or when he actually began to write his epic. on both the
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. The courage and enterprise of Portuguese explorers had inspired the idea of a national epic during the 15th century. He may have spent 17 years in India.—d. 1580. He was a member of the impoverished old aristocracy but well-related to the grandees of Portugal and Spain. and a dedication to King Sebastian. After an introduction. Port. The Lusiads). but his time there has not been documented. Lusitania. He is the author of the epic poem Os Lusíadas (1572. an invocation. The title of Camões’s epic poem is taken from the word Lusiads. but it was left to Camões in the 16th century to put it into execution. 1524/25. Lisbon)
L
uís de Camões is Portugal’s great national poet. He returned to Portugal in 1570. remains unproved.7
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LUÍS DE CAMÕES
(b. The 10 cantos of the poem are in ottava rima and amount to 1. victories not only over their fellowman but also over the forces of nature as motivated by the inimical gods of classical mythology. In July of that year he was granted a royal pension. The work extols the glorious deeds of the Portuguese and their victories over the enemies of Christianity.102 stanzas in all. A tradition that Camões studied at the University of Coimbra or that he followed any regular studies. which describes Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the sea route to India. and his Os Lusíadas was published in Lisbon in early 1572. the action. which means “Portuguese” and is in turn derived from the ancient Roman name for Portugal.

43–69). and Vasco da Gama is able to reach Calicut (Kozhikode. convokes a council of the sea gods and incites them to arrange the shipwreck of the Portuguese ﬂeet. begins. southwestern India). 85–91). One of the nymphs sings of the future deeds of the Portuguese (Cantos IX and X). and the entertainment ends with a description of the universe given by
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. and V). When the passengers re-embark. the end of his voyage. and the nymphs reward them for their labours. the battle of Aljubarrota. There his brother. and at the king’s request Vasco da Gama relates the entire history of Portugal from its origins to the inception of their great voyage (Cantos III. the poet takes advantage of leisure hours on board to narrate the story of the Doze de Inglaterra (Canto VI. Da Gama’s ships are already under way in the Indian Ocean. IV. the description of St. Elmo’s ﬁre and the waterspout. who becomes a symbol of death for the sake of love. now in Kerala state. Paulo da Gama. the giant of classical parentage who. Bacchus. ever ready to impede the progress of the Portuguese in the East. at the Cape of Good Hope. tells da Gama he will lie in wait to destroy the ﬂeets coming back from India. On their homeward voyage the mariners chance upon the island that Venus has created for them. These cantos contain some of the most beautiful passages in the poem: the murder of Inês de Castro. and the Olympian gods gather to discuss the fate of the expedition (which is favoured by Venus and attacked by Bacchus). the vision of King Manuel I. and the story of Adamastor.7
Luís de Camões
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historical and the mythological levels. The voyagers spend several days in Melinde on the east coast of Africa. In the meantime. receives the king’s representative on board and explains the signiﬁcance of the characters depicted on the banners that adorn the captain’s ship (Cantos VII and VIII). sailing up the coast of East Africa. This is prevented by Venus (Canto VI.

battles. who. after which the sailors embark once more and the nymphs accompany them on their homeward journey. expressing through them the gravity of thought and the ﬁnest human emotions. As a result. 28. delicate perception and superb artistic skill. and many other poems. particularly of his epic and lyric poetry. idling their time away in petty struggles.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
(b. 23. were failing to unite against the encroaching conquests of Islam in southeastern Europe. Os Lusíadas reveals an astonishing command of language and variety of styles and provides a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary man and poet. Camões also wrote dramatic and lyric poetry.
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. near Bordeaux. In Os Lusíadas Camões achieved an exquisite harmony between classical learning and practical experience. elegies. Sept.7
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Thetis and Vasco da Gama. 1533. The epic was his eulogy of the “dangerous life” (vida perigosa) and was a stern warning to the Christian monarchs. France—d. and storms and other natural phenomena transcend the thrust of classical allusions that permeate the work and make for the high-ﬂown yet ﬂuent style of the poem. In his dramatic works he tried to combine national and classical tendencies. show the poet’s full powers. all published posthumously. Feb. Camões had a permanent and unparalleled impact on Portuguese and Brazilian literature alike. while his sonnets. Realistic descriptions in the poem of sensual encounters. Château de Montaigne. 1592. Château de Montaigne)
I
n his Essais (Essays) the French writer Michel de Montaigne established a new literary form—the essay— that he used to create one of the most captivating and intimate self-portraits ever given.

became his refuge. that is. It was in this round room. and writing. a meeting that was one of the most signiﬁcant events in Montaigne’s life.
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. humanist scholar. which comprise respectively 57 and 37 chapters of greatly varying lengths. in order to ﬁll the emptiness left by the loss of the irretrievable friend. that Montaigne set out to put on paper his essais. the highest national court of justice. an already distinguished civil servant. In 1570 Montaigne sold his seat in the Bordeaux Parliament and retired in 1571 to the castle of Montaigne in order to devote his time to reading. An extraordinary friendship. where he studied law. sprang up between Montaigne and the slightly older La Boétie. meditating. he made the acquaintance of Étienne de la Boétie. He spent the years from 1571 to 1580 composing the ﬁrst two books of the Essays. at the age of 24. which included the exclusive use of Latin. they were published in Bordeaux in 1580. still the international language of educated people. When La Boétie died. There. and writer. lined with a thousand books and decorated with Greek and Latin inscriptions. He continued his education at the College of Guyenne and eventually at the University of Toulouse. six years after La Boétie’s death. His library. He entered into the magistrature. one of the eight regional parliaments that constituted the French Parliament. installed in the castle’s tower. he left a void in Montaigne’s life that no other being was ever able to ﬁll. the probings and testings of his mind. It is likely that Montaigne started on his writing career.7 Michel de Montaigne
7
As a young child Montaigne was tutored at home according to his father’s ideas of pedagogy. based on a profound intellectual and emotional closeness and reciprocity. As a result the boy did not learn French until he was six years old. eventually becoming a member of the Parliament of Bordeaux.

Montaigne resumed his literary work by embarking on the third book of the Essays. which signify not so much profound changes in his ideas as further explorations of his thought and experience. The year 1588 was marked by both political and literary events. Austria. Montaigne saw his age as one of dissimulation. Toward the end of this term the plague broke out in Bordeaux. when Catherine de Médicis appealed to his abilities as a negotiator to mediate between herself and Henry of Navarre (a mission that turned out to be unsuccessful)— Montaigne was able to ﬁnish the work in 1587. and hypocrisy. Germany. The skepticism he expresses throughout the Essays is
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. soon raging out of control and killing one-third of the population. until July 1585. violence. by military activity close to his estate. corruption. Upon his return he assumed the position of mayor of Bordeaux at the request of King Henry III and held it for two terms. During his second term Montaigne played a crucial role in preserving the equilibrium between the Catholic majority and the important Protestant League representation in Bordeaux. Switzerland. and Italy. After having been interrupted again—by a renewed outbreak of the plague that forced Montaigne and his family to seek refuge elsewhere.7
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Montaigne then set out to travel. adding new passages. During the same trip he supervised the publication of the ﬁfth edition of the Essays. and he considered the human being to be a creature of weakness and failure. He spent the last years of his life at his château. continuing to read and to reﬂect and to work on the Essays. and in the course of 15 months he visited areas of France. During a trip to Paris Montaigne was twice arrested and brieﬂy imprisoned by members of the Protestant League because of his loyalty to Henry III. and by diplomatic duties.

He was a notable short-story writer. 29?. Spain—d. and poet. the wandering developments.” which implies not a transmission of proven knowledge or of conﬁdent opinion but a project of trial and error. Neither a reference to an established genre (for Montaigne’s book inaugurated the term essay for the short prose composition treating a given subject in a rather informal and personal manner) nor an indication of a necessary internal unity and structure within the work. and the savory. and he insists on the immediacy and the authenticity of their testimony. so does my style. The Essays are the record of Montaigne’s thoughts. Sept. concrete vocabulary all denote that ﬁdelity to the freshness and the immediacy of the living thought. 1547.” he wrote. 1616.7 Michel de Montaigne
7
reﬂected in the French title of his work. playwright. Cervantes tried his hand in all the major literary genres save the epic. The multiple digressions.
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. Alcalá de Henares. on a miniature scale. 1615). or “Attempts. presented not in artiﬁcially organized stages but as they occurred and reoccurred to him in different shapes throughout his thinking and writing activity. Madrid)
M
iguel de Cervantes was a Spanish novelist. and a few of those in his collection of Novelas exemplares (1613. he is the most important and celebrated ﬁgure in Spanish literature. April 22. “As my mind roams. Essais. of tentative exploration. They are not the record of an intellectual evolution but of a continuous accretion.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
(b. Best known as the creator of Don Quixote (1605. Exemplary Stories) attain a level close to that of Don Quixote. the title indicates an intellectual attitude of questioning and of continuous assessment.

then a possession of the Spanish crown. and they concur in testifying to his personal courage. and a third rendered his left hand useless for the rest of his life. Though stricken with a fever. he apparently did not go to a university. Elizabeth of Valois. the papacy. remains conjectural. He was there for about a year before he saw active service. he refused to stay below and joined the thick of the ﬁghting. the centre of the
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. Cervantes. part of the large ﬂeet under the command of Don Juan de Austria that engaged the enemy on October 7 in the Gulf of Lepanto near Corinth. By 1570 he had enlisted as a soldier in a Spanish infantry regiment stationed in Naples. together with his brother Rodrigo. The supposition. He always looked back on his conduct in the battle with pride. A confrontation between the Turkish ﬂeet and the naval forces of Venice. There are independent accounts of Cervantes’s conduct in the action. based on a passage in one of the Exemplary Stories. that he studied for a time under the Jesuits. was sold into slavery in Algiers. and Spain was inevitable at this time. On this voyage his ship was attacked and captured by Barbary corsairs. That same year he left Spain for Italy. on the death of Philip II’s young queen. He received two gunshot wounds in the chest.7
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A Life Filled with Adventure
Little is known of Cervantes’s early education. appeared in 1569. including some of humble origin. The ﬁerce battle ended in a crushing defeat for the Turks that was ultimately to break their control of the Mediterranean. He set sail for Spain in September 1575 with letters of commendation to the king from the duque de Sessa and Don Juan himself. Unlike most Spanish writers of his time. though not unlikely. What is certain is that at some stage he became an avid reader of books. His ﬁrst published poem. In mid-September 1571 Cervantes sailed on board the Marquesa.

the renegade Dali Mami and later Hasan Paşa. Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images
Christian slave trafﬁc in the Muslim world. it appears. Cervantes was a real-life counterpart to his most famous literary character. Don Quixote. Miguel’s family. raised the 500 gold escudos demanded for his release. This had the effect of raising his ransom price. protecting him from punishment by death. A soldier and explorer who had once been sold into slavery. or torture when his four daring bids to escape were frustrated. with the aid and intervention of the Trinitarian friars. while also. and thus prolonging his captivity. whatever the reason. In September 1580. treated him with considerable leniency in the circumstances. pictured here. three years after Rodrigo had earned his freedom. The letters he carried magniﬁed his importance in the eyes of his captors. His masters.7
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The facts of his life rival any of the tales of adventure Spanish author Cervantes committed to paper.
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. mutilation.

which. the early dawn of the Golden Age of the Spanish theatre. Cervantes spent most of the rest of his life in a manner that contrasted entirely with his decade of action and danger. Though destined to be a disappointed dramatist. and he was obliged to turn in a very different direction. he later described as the best he ever wrote. the historical tragedy of La Numancia (1580s. His ﬁrst published ﬁction. Cervantes went on trying to get managers to accept his stage works. a good price for a ﬁrst book. Blas de Robles. information about Cervantes’s life over the next four or ﬁve years is sparse. The publisher. By 1587 it was clear that he was not going to make a living from literature. “The Trafﬁc of Algiers”). Cervantes sold the rights of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (“The Ingenious
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. he noted.336 reales for it. La confusa (“Confusion”). it would be 25 years before he scored a major literary success with Don Quixote. Only two plays certainly survive from this time. He would be constantly short of money and in tedious and exacting employment. The number is vague. were received by the public without being booed off the stage or having the actors pelted with vegetables. La Galatea (Galatea: A Pastoral Romance). He contracted to write two plays for the theatrical manager Gaspar de Porras in 1585.
Don Quixote
In July or August 1604. A series of positions as a civil servant followed. in the newly fashionable genre of the pastoral romance. Numantia: A Tragedy) and El trato de Argel (1580s.7
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Back in Spain. He spent time in jail several times because accounts he oversaw showed discrepancies. Many years afterward he claimed to have written 20 or 30 plays in this period. After 1598. appeared in 1585. paid him 1. one of which. Cervantes also turned his hand to the writing of drama at this time.

Cervantes was just entering the most productive period of his career. meant that Cervantes made no more ﬁnancial proﬁt on Part I of his novel. France. Lope de Vega. Don Quixote certainly pokes fun at the adventures of literary knights-errant.7
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Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha. with less than a dozen years left to him. the vicissitudes of whose relations with Cervantes were then at a low point. The novel was an immediate success. Cervantes’s masterpiece Don Quixote has been variously interpreted as a parody of chivalric romances. In 1613 the 12 Exemplary Stories were published. Nevertheless. Part I) to the publisher-bookseller Francisco de Robles for an unknown sum. at age 57. readers who view it as a parody accept at face value Cervantes’s intention to denounce the popular yet outdated romances of his time. but its plot also addresses the historical realities of 17th-century Spain.” known as Don Quixote. many of which were long attributed to the author. still-unsatisﬁed ambition. however. and Italy as in Spain. License to publish was granted in September. While the Romantic tradition downplayed the novel’s hilarity by transforming Don Quixote into a tragic hero. The compositors at Juan de la Cuesta’s press in Madrid are now known to have been responsible for a great many errors in the text. Cervantes’s claim in the prologue to be the ﬁrst to write
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. among others. a commentary on the author’s alienation. The sale of the publishing rights. with multiple editions published across Europe. an epic of heroic idealism. and a tireless urge to experiment with the forms of ﬁction ensured that. The name of Cervantes was soon to be as well known in England. and a critique of Spanish imperialism. and the book came out in January 1605. There is some evidence of its content’s being known or known about before publication—to. Thomas Shelton’s English translation of the ﬁrst part appeared in 1612. relative success.

perhaps like Boccaccio’s Decameron). the Semanas del jardín (“Weeks in the Garden”. a collection of tales. but he had probably not gotten much more than halfway through by late July 1614.” Eng. trans. y ocho entremeses nuevos. In 1614 Cervantes published Viage del Parnaso. Don Quixote. It was quickly reprinted outside of Spain. Part II. together with eight short comic interludes. a long allegorical poem in a mock-mythological and satirical vein. emerged from the same press as its predecessor late in 1615. The second part capitalizes on the potential of the ﬁrst. within the two general categories of romance-based stories and realistic ones. developing and diversifying without sacriﬁcing familiarity. with its frame tale El casamiento engañoso (“The Deceitful Marriage”). a quasi-picaresque novella. Their precise dates of composition are in most cases uncertain. There was Bernardo (the name of a legendary Spanish epic hero). There is some variety in the collection. is probably Cervantes’s most profound and original creation next to Don Quixote. Having lost all hope of seeing any more of his plays staged. in Three Exemplary Novels. El coloquio de los perros (“Colloquy of the Dogs. 1952). with a postscript in prose. Segunda parte del ingenioso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha (“Second Part of the Ingenious Knight Don Quixote of La Mancha”). if indeed he ever actually started writing them. It is not certain when Cervantes began writing Part II. he had eight of them published in 1615. and the continuation
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. in Ocho comedias.
Later Years
In his last years Cervantes mentioned several works that apparently did not get as far as the printing press.7
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original novellas (short stories in the Italian manner) in Castilian is substantially justiﬁed.

London)
E
dmund Spenser was an English poet whose long allegorical poem The Faerie Queene is one of the greatest in the English language. the Persiles is an ambitious work that exploits the mythic and symbolic potential of romance. It was an intellectually prestigious genre destined to be very successful in 17th-century France. It was very successful when it appeared.—d. 1552/53. written three days before he died. The Shepheardes Calender (1579 or 1580). The exact spot is not marked. The one that was published. Cervantes.
EDMUND SPENSER
(b.7 Miguel de Cervantes
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to his Galatea. Jan. 13. Intended both to edify and to entertain. historia setentrional (“The Labours of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story”). In the dedication. 1599. Following the example of Virgil and of many later poets. in which various characters.” usually short poems in the form of pastoral dialogues). in the guise of innocent and simple shepherds. His ﬁrst important published work. converse about life and love in a variety of elegantly managed verse
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. Los trabaios de Persiles y Sigismunda.” movingly bade farewell to the world. Little is known for certain about Spenser before he entered the University of Cambridge in 1569. In it Cervantes sought to renovate the heroic romance of adventure and love in the manner of the Aethiopica of Heliodorus. Eng. London. He died in 1616 and was buried in the convent of the Discalced Trinitarians in the Calle de Cantarranas (now the Calle de Lope de Vega). can be called the ﬁrst work of the English literary Renaissance. was his last romance. “with a foot already in the stirrup. posthumously in 1617. Spenser began his career with a series of eclogues (literally “selections.

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forms, formulating weighty—often satirical—opinions on questions of the day. Spenser’s Calender consists of 12 eclogues, one named after each month of the year, and was well received in its day. Spenser appears by 1580 to have been serving Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester and to have become a member of the literary circle led by Sir Philip Sidney, Leicester’s nephew, to whom the Calender was dedicated and who praised it in his important critical work The Defence of Poesie (1595). In 1580 Spenser was also made secretary to the new lord deputy of Ireland, Arthur Lord Grey, who was a friend of the Sidney family. As Grey’s secretary, Spenser accompanied him on risky military campaigns as well as on more routine journeys in Ireland. Spenser may have witnessed the Smerwick massacre (1580), and his poetry is haunted by nightmare characters who embody a wild lawlessness. For four or ﬁve years, from roughly 1584, Spenser carried out the duties of a second important ofﬁcial position in Ireland, deputizing for a friend as clerk of the lords president (governors) of Munster, the southernmost Irish province. In 1588 or 1589 Spenser took over the 3,000-acre (1,200-hectare) plantation of Kilcolman, near Cork. By acquiring this estate, Spenser made his choice for the future—to rise into the privileged class of what was, to all intents, a colonial land of opportunity rather than to seek power and position on the more crowded ground of the homeland, where he had made his poetic reputation. It was under these conditions that Spenser completed his greatest poem, on which he had begun work by 1580. In its present form, The Faerie Queene consists of six books and a fragment (known as the “Mutabilitie Cantos”). As a setting Spenser invented the land of Faerie and its queen, Gloriana. To express himself he invented what is

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now known as the Spenserian stanza: a nine-line stanza, the ﬁrst eight of ﬁve stresses and the last of six, whose rhyme pattern is ababbcbcc. What is most characteristic of Spenser in The Faerie Queene is his serious view of the capacity of the romance form to act as a paradigm of human experience: the moral life as quest, pilgrimage, aspiration; as eternal war with an enemy, still to be known; and as encounter, crisis, the moment of illumination—in short, as ethics, with the added dimensions of mystery, terror, love, and victory and with all the generous virtues exalted. In The Faerie Queene Spenser proves himself a master: picture, music, metre, story—all elements are at one with the deeper signiﬁcance of his poem, providing a moral heraldry of colours, emblems, legends, folklore, and mythical allusion, all prompting deep, instinctive responses. The ﬁrst three books of The Faerie Queene were published in London in 1590, together with a dedication to Queen Elizabeth and commendatory sonnets to notables of the court. Spenser saw the book through the press, made a hurried visit to Ireland, and returned speedily to London—presumably in the hope of preferment, which he received in 1591, when Elizabeth gave Spenser a small pension for life. Back in Ireland, Spenser pressed on with his writing, and in early 1595 he published Amoretti and Epithalamion, a sonnet sequence and a marriage ode celebrating his marriage. This group of poems is unique among Renaissance sonnet sequences in that it celebrates a successful love affair culminating in marriage. Books IV, V, and VI of The Faerie Queene appeared in 1596 and are strikingly more ambiguous and ironic than the ﬁrst three books. This burst of publication was, however, the last of his lifetime. He was buried with ceremony in Westminster Abbey.

ope de Vega was the outstanding dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age, author of as many as 1,800 plays and several hundred shorter dramatic pieces, of which 431 plays and 50 shorter pieces are extant. He acquired a humanistic education from his abundant though haphazard readings in erudite anthologies. In 1583 he took part in the Spanish expedition against the Azores. By this time he had established himself as a playwright in Madrid and was living from his comedias (tragicomic social dramas). He also exercised an undeﬁned role as gentleman attendant or secretary to various nobles, adapting his role as servant or panderer according to the situation. By 1608, however, when Vega was named to a sinecure position as a familiar of the Inquisition and then prosecutor (promotor ﬁscal) of the Apostolic Chamber, he had become a famous poet and was already regarded as the “phoenix of Spanish wits.” After experiencing a deep religious crisis, he entered the ﬁrst of several religious orders in 1609. From this time on he wrote almost exclusively religious works, though he also continued his theatrical work, which was ﬁnancially indispensable. In 1614 he entered the priesthood, but his continued service as secretary and panderer hindered him from obtaining the ecclesiastical beneﬁts he sought. New and scandalous romantic relationships eventually followed, in continuation of a pattern Vega pursued throughout his life. In 1627 his verse epic on the life and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, which was dedicated to Pope Urban VIII, brought in reward a doctorate in theology of the Collegium Sapientiae and the cross of the Order of Malta, out of which came his proud use of the title Frey (“Brother”). His closing years were

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full of gloom, however, and his death in Madrid evoked national mourning. Vega became identiﬁed as a playwright with the comedia, a comprehensive term for the new drama of Spain’s Golden Age. Vega’s productivity for the stage, however exaggerated by report, remains phenomenal. He claimed to have written an average of 20 sheets a day throughout his life and left untouched scarcely a vein of writing then current. Cervantes called him “the prodigy of nature.” The earliest ﬁrm date for a play written by Vega is 1593. By the beginning of the 16th century, through sheer force of creative genius and fertility of invention, Vega had given the comedia its basic formula and raised it to a peak of splendour. It was essentially a social drama, ringing a thousand changes on the accepted foundations of society: respect for crown, for church, and for the human personality, the latter being symbolized in the “point of honour” (pundonor) that Vega commended as the best theme of all “since there are none but are strongly moved thereby.” This “point of honour” was a matter largely of convention, “honour” being equivalent, in a very limited and brittle sense, to social reputation. It followed that this was a drama less of character than of action and intrigue that rarely, if ever, grasped the true essence of tragedy. Few of the plays that Vega wrote were perfect, and in theme they range over a vast horizon. But he had an unerring sense for the theme and detail that could move an audience conscious of being on the crest of its country’s greatness to respond to a mirroring on the stage of some of the basic ingredients of that greatness. Because of him the comedia became a vast sounding board for every chord in the Spanish consciousness, a “national” drama in the truest sense.

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All Vega’s plays suffer from haste of composition, partly a consequence of the public’s insatiable desire for novelty. His ﬁrst acts are commonly his best, with the third a hasty cutting of knots or tying up of loose ends that takes scant account both of probability and of psychology. There was, too, a limit to his inventiveness in the recurrence of basic themes and situations, particularly in his cloak and sword plays. But Vega’s defects, like his strength, derive from the accuracy with which he projected onto the stage the essence of his country and age. Vega’s plays remain true to the great age of Spain into which he had been born and which he had come to know, intuitively rather than by study, as no one had ever known it before. Vega’s nondramatic works in verse and prose ﬁlled 21 volumes in 1776–79. Much of this vast output has withered, but its variety remains impressive. Vega wrote pastoral romances, verse histories of recent events, verse biographies of Spanish saints, long epic poems and burlesques upon such works, and prose tales, imitating or adapting works by Ariosto and Cervantes in the process. His lyric compositions—ballads, elegies, epistles, sonnets (there are 1,587 of these)—are myriad. Formally they rely much on the conceit, and in content they provide a running commentary on the poet’s whole emotional life.

he Elizabethan poet Christopher Marlowe was Shakespeare’s most important predecessor in English drama. He is noted especially for his establishment of dramatic blank verse. Marlowe obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Cambridge in 1584. After 1587 he was in
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London, writing for the theatres, occasionally getting into trouble with the authorities because of his violent and disreputable behaviour, and probably also engaging himself from time to time in the government’s secret service. Marlowe won a dangerous reputation for “atheism,” but this could, in Queen Elizabeth I’s time, indicate merely unorthodox religious opinions. There is evidence of his unorthodoxy, notably in the denunciation of him written by the spy Richard Baines and in the letter of the playwright Thomas Kyd to the lord keeper in 1593 after Marlowe’s death. Kyd alleged that certain papers “denying the deity of Jesus Christ” that were found in his room belonged to Marlowe, who had shared the room two years before. Whatever the case may be, on May 18, 1593, the Privy Council issued an order for Marlowe’s arrest. On May 30, however, he was killed by Ingram Frizer at a lodging house where they and two other men had spent most of the day and where, it was alleged, a ﬁght broke out between them over the bill. In a playwriting career that spanned little more than six years, Marlowe’s achievements were diverse and splendid. Perhaps before leaving Cambridge he had already written Tamburlaine the Great (in two parts, both performed by the end of 1587; published 1590), in which he established blank verse as the staple medium for later Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic writing. Almost certainly during his later Cambridge years, Marlowe had translated Ovid’s Amores (The Loves) and the ﬁrst book of Lucan’s Pharsalia from the Latin. About this time he also wrote the play Dido, Queen of Carthage (published in 1594 as the joint work of Marlowe and Thomas Nashe). With the production of Tamburlaine he received recognition and acclaim, and playwriting became his major concern in the few years that lay ahead. Both parts of Tamburlaine were published anonymously in 1590, and the publisher
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omitted certain passages that he found incongruous with the play’s serious concern with history; even so, the extant Tamburlaine text can be regarded as substantially Marlowe’s. No other of his plays or poems or translations was published during his life. His unﬁnished but splendid poem Hero and Leander, which is almost certainly the ﬁnest nondramatic Elizabethan poem apart from those produced by Edmund Spenser, appeared in 1598. There is argument among scholars concerning the order in which the plays subsequent to Tamburlaine were written. It is not uncommonly held that Faustus —Marlowe’s most famous play, in which he tells the story of the doctor-turned-necromancer Faustus, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power— quickly followed Tamburlaine and that then Marlowe turned to a more neutral, more “social” kind of writing in Edward II and The Massacre at Paris. His last play may have been The Jew of Malta, in which he signally broke new ground: the main character, Barabas, is more closely incorporated within his society than either Tamburlaine, the supreme conqueror, or Faustus, the lonely adventurer against God. It is known that Tamburlaine, Faustus, and The Jew of Malta were performed by the Admiral’s Men, a company whose outstanding actor was Edward Alleyn, who most certainly played Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas the Jew.

illiam Shakespeare is often called the English national poet and is considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time. He occupies a position unique in world literature. Other poets, such as Homer
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Warwickshire. (Given the somewhat rigid social distinctions of the 16th century. moralists. the schoolmaster’s salary being paid by the borough. of Wilmcote. shows that he was baptized there on April 26. who in 1565 was chosen an alderman and in 1568 bailiff (the position corresponding to mayor. his birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23. He was engaged in various kinds of trade and appears to have suffered some ﬂuctuations in prosperity. and poets. John Shakespeare. and novelists.” has been fulﬁlled. whose plays. have transcended national barriers as well. No lists of the pupils who were at the school in the 16th century have survived. was a burgess of the borough. written in the late 16th and early 17th centuries for a small repertory theatre. His wife. and speak the language fairly well and studying some of the Classical historians. are now performed and read more often and in more countries than ever before. 1564. the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson. and the education there was free. The prophecy of his great contemporary. But no writer’s living reputation can compare to that of Shakespeare. came from an ancient family and was the heiress to some land. this marriage must have been a step up the social scale for John Shakespeare. Shakespeare did not go
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. such as Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens. before the grant of a further charter to Stratford in 1664). Mary Arden. His father.) Stratford enjoyed a grammar school of good quality. The boy’s education would consist mostly of Latin studies—learning to read.
Early Life in Stratford
The parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratfordupon-Avon. that Shakespeare “was not of an age. but for all time. Warwickshire. but it would be absurd to suppose the bailiff of the town did not send his son there.7
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and Dante. write.

twins were baptized. It has also been conjectured that Shakespeare spent some time as a member of a great household and that he was a soldier. near Stratford.) The next date of interest is found in the records of the Stratford church. and executed by two yeomen of Stratford. There are stories—given currency long after his death—of stealing deer and getting into trouble with a local magnate. named Sandells and Richardson. Where and exactly when are not known. at age 18.7
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on to the university. rhetoric. is not known. Hamnet and Judith. of going to London and gaining entry to the world of theatre by minding the horses of theatregoers. One cannot conclude. and other studies then followed there would have interested him. 2 miles [3. was baptized on May 26. of earning his living as a schoolmaster in the country. 1585. On Feb. and indeed.” upon the consent of her friends and upon once asking of the banns. 2. 1582. until his name begins to appear in London theatre records. he married. 1583. but the episcopal registry at Worcester preserves a bond dated Nov.) How Shakespeare spent the next eight years or so. 28. (Hamnet. born to William Shakespeare. as a security to the bishop for the issue of a license for the marriage of William Shakespeare and “Anne Hathaway of Stratford. In lieu of external evidence. Shakespeare’s only son. it is unlikely that the scholarly round of logic. for he was clearly a writer who without
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. Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote. for example. But this method is unsatisfactory. There is good evidence to associate her with a family of Hathaways who inhabited a beautiful farmhouse. such extrapolations about Shakespeare’s life have often been made from the internal “evidence” of his writings. named Susanna. (Anne died in 1623. now much visited. seven years after Shakespeare. Instead. from his allusions to the law that Shakespeare was a lawyer. where a daughter. perhaps in the Low Countries.2 km] from Stratford. died 11 years later.

Many have questioned whether Shakespeare actually wrote all the works credited to him. Authenticity has been an issue with the famous playwright for years.7
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This painting. ﬁrst identiﬁed in 2009 as depicting William Shakespeare. Oli Scarff/Getty Images 83
. is believed to be the only true portrait of him made during his lifetime.

What these words mean is difﬁcult to determine. the 3rd earl of Southampton. many of the nobility were good patrons of the drama and friends of the actors. 1592) was published after Greene’s death. groats-worth of witte. when a fellow dramatist. Rough drafts of this
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. Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.7
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difﬁculty could get whatever knowledge he needed for the composition of his plays. a mutual acquaintance wrote a preface offering an apology to Shakespeare and testifying to his worth. When the book in which they appear (Greenes. and to this nobleman were dedicated his ﬁrst published poems. For. being an absolute Johannes Factotum. that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you. Shakespeare seems to have attracted the attention of the young Henry Wriothesley. but clearly they are insulting. Robert Greene. and.
Career in the Theatre
The ﬁrst reference to Shakespeare in the literary world of London comes in 1592. beautiﬁed with our feathers. This preface also indicates that Shakespeare was by then making important friends. One striking piece of evidence that Shakespeare began to prosper early and tried to retrieve the family’s fortunes and establish its gentility is the fact that a coat of arms was granted to John Shakespeare in 1596. is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country. although the puritanical city of London was generally hostile to the theatre. bought with a million of Repentance. and clearly Shakespeare is the object of the sarcasms. declared in a pamphlet written on his deathbed:
There is an upstart crow.

though the ﬁnal document. which he as a boy must have passed every day in walking to school.
Private Life
Shakespeare had little contact with ofﬁcialdom. which must have been handed to the Shakespeares. They had the best actor. apart from walking—dressed in the royal livery as a member of the King’s Men—at the coronation of King James I in 1604. sharing in a cooperative enterprise and intimately concerned with the ﬁnancial success of the plays he wrote. They had the best dramatist. The coat of arms appears on Shakespeare’s monument (constructed before 1623) in the Stratford church. Equally interesting as evidence of Shakespeare’s worldly success was his purchase in 1597 of New Place.7 William Shakespeare
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grant have been preserved in the College of Arms. the Globe (ﬁnished by the autumn of 1599).
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. How his career in the theatre began is unclear. It is no wonder that the company prospered. Shakespeare. He continued to look after his ﬁnancial interests. but from roughly 1594 onward he was an important member of the Lord Chamberlain’s company of players (called the King’s Men after the accession of James I in 1603). Richard Burbage. Shakespeare became a full-time professional man of his own theatre. writing more than a million words of poetic drama of the highest quality. Almost certainly William himself took the initiative and paid the fees. a large house in Stratford. All that can be deduced is that for 20 years Shakespeare devoted himself assiduously to his art. has not survived. Unfortunately. London. They had the best theatre. written records give little indication of the way in which Shakespeare’s professional life molded his marvelous artistry.

that 18 years later Quiney’s son Thomas became the husband of Judith. one to the aforementioned Thomas Quiney and the other to John Hall. No letters written by Shakespeare have survived. For some time he lodged with a French Huguenot family called Mountjoy. show Shakespeare as giving evidence in a genial way (though unable to remember certain important facts that would have decided the case) and as interesting himself generally in the family’s affairs. Nothing further is known about the transaction. Susanna. The records of a lawsuit in May 1612. whither he had gone from Stratford on business. Wm. Shakespeare’s second daughter. It is of some interest. resulting from a Mountjoy family quarrel. It was written by one Richard Quiney and addressed by him from the Bell Inn in Carter Lane. Olave’s Church in Cripplegate. It entailed his quite ample property on the male heirs of his elder daughter.7
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He bought properties in London and in Stratford. moreover. London. but. On one side of the paper is inscribed: “To my loving good friend and countryman. London. because so few opportunities of seeing into Shakespeare’s private life present themselves. (Both his daughters were then married.) As an afterthought. but a private letter to him happened to get caught up with some ofﬁcial transactions of the town of Stratford and so has been preserved in the borough archives. a respected physician of Stratford. In 1605 he purchased a share (about one-ﬁfth) of the Stratford tithes—a fact that explains why he was eventually buried in the chancel of its parish church. Shakespeare. he
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. this begging letter becomes a touching document. deliver these. Shakespeare’s will (made on March 25.” Apparently Quiney thought his fellow Stratfordian a person to whom he could apply for the loan of £30—a large sum in Elizabethan times. 1616) is a long and detailed document. who lived near St. Mr.

and As You Like It (c. Instead these lines. Blest be the man that spares these stones. Shakespeare brought to perfection the genre of romantic comedy that he had helped to invent with such plays as A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1598–1600). for Jesus’ sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here.7 William Shakespeare
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bequeathed his “second-best bed” to his wife. 1592–94) were immediately successful. 1595–96). 1616. Shakespeare did not experiment with formal tragedy in his early years. He died on April 23. These comedies—such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. The young playwright was drawn more quickly into comedy. 1590–94) and The Taming of the Shrew (c. The two genres are nicely complementary: the one deals with courtship and marriage.
Plays and Poems
Other than Titus Andronicus (c. appeared:
Good friend. possibly his own. More history plays completed his dramatization of 15th-century English history. 1598–99). Much Ado About Nothing (c. and with more immediate success. No name was inscribed on his gravestone in the chancel of the parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon. such plays as Richard III (c. while the other examines
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. And curst be he that moves my bones. In the second half of the 1590s. 1589–92). no one can be certain what this notorious legacy means. His early history plays represent a genre with very few precedents. Perhaps Shakespeare was already ill. The testator’s signatures to the will are apparently in a shaky hand. 1590–94)—revel in stories of amorous courtship in which a plucky and admirable young woman (played by a boy actor) is paired off against her male wooer.

although other plays. and Troilus and Cressida. about 1592–94. and feelings of ingratitude. King Lear (c. 1594–96) is unique among plays of this middle period: it combines elements of romantic comedy and tragedy. likely collaborations. sexual jealousy. during a pause in his theatrical career when the plague closed down much theatrical activity. and world-weariness. yet the tragic vision is not that of the great tragedies that were to follow. 1606–07) explores ambition mad enough to kill a father ﬁgure who stands in the way. The Tempest seems to have been intended as Shakespeare’s farewell to the theatre. and death. Measure for Measure. Shakespeare’s poetry dates from his early professional years. Shakespeare then turned to comedies that are usually called romances or tragicomedies. midlife crisis. 1605–06) is about aging. The tragedy Romeo and Juliet (c. aging. One remarkable aspect about Shakespeare’s great tragedies is that they proceed through such a staggering range of human emotions. despondency. Hamlet (c. Macbeth (c. all of which date from 1599 to 1605. followed. 1611) are typical in telling stories of wandering and separation that lead eventually to tearful and joyous reunion. Antony and Cleopatra (c. generational conﬂict. 1599–1601) cycles through revenge. Othello (c.7
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the career of a young man growing up to be a worthy king. 1609–11) and The Tempest (c.
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. 1606–07) studies the exhilarating but ultimately dismaying phenomenon of midlife crisis. About 1599–1600 Shakespeare turned with unsparing intensity to the exploration of darker issues such as revenge. The Winter’s Tale (c. and especially the emotions that are appropriate to the mature years of the human cycle. 1603–04) centres on sexual jealousy in marriage. He began writing not only his great tragedies but a group of plays that are hard to classify in terms of genre: All’s Well That Ends Well.

London)
(1621–31). London. which rank among the best of the 17th century. and Shakespeare did not oversee their publication. As a narrative. 24 and June 19. Paul’s
Life and Career
At age 12 Donne matriculated at the University of Oxford.
of the Metaphysical John Donne. March 31. 1572. He is also noted for his religious verse and treatises and for his sermons. Elizabeth. of joy at being together and sharing beautiful experiences.—d. of grief at separation. most scholars set them within the period 1593–1600. sometime between Jan. But their order of composition is unknown. 1631. His sonnets are more difﬁcult to date. though he took no degree from either university because as a Roman Catholic he could not swear the required oath of allegiance to the Protestant queen. the leading English poetCathedral. London school and dean of St. it is also unclear whether the sonnets reﬂect any circumstances in Shakespeare’s personal life. is often considered the greatest love poet in the English language.
JOHN DONNE
(b. Both owe a good deal to Ovid. ﬁrst at Thavies
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. since they cannot have been written all at one time.7
William Shakespeare
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Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) are the only works that Shakespeare seems to have shepherded through the printing process. and he then most likely continued his education at the University of Cambridge. of jealousy. the sonnet sequence tells of strong attachment. Eng. where he studied for three years. Following his studies Donne probably traveled in Spain and Italy and then returned to London to read law.

He was made a royal chaplain and received. niece of Egerton’s second wife and the daughter of Sir George More. Sir Robert Drury. in 1617.7
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Inn (1591) and then at Lincoln’s Inn (1592–94).
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. During the next 10 years Donne lived in poverty and humiliating dependence. Two years after his ordination. who was chancellor of the garter. in whose employ Donne remained for almost ﬁve years. all possibilities of a career in public service were dashed. His bereavement turned him fully to his vocation as an Anglican divine. In 1621 he was installed as dean of St. In 1612 a newfound patron. provided the Donnes with a house in London. probably in December 1601. The two married secretly. lord keeper of the great seal. and he ﬁnally agreed to take holy orders. Paul’s Cathedral. at the king’s command. yet he wrote and studied assiduously. After his return to London in 1597. and Donne found himself at age 30 with neither prospects for employment nor adequate funds with which to support his household. and complimentary and funerary verse for his patrons. Grief-stricken. Because of the marriage. Donne vowed never to marry again. Anne Donne died after giving birth to a stillborn child. The power and eloquence of Donne’s sermons soon secured for him a reputation as the foremost preacher in the England of his day. the degree of doctor of divinity from Cambridge. producing prose works on theology and canon law and composing love lyrics. In 1614 Donne had come to believe he had a religious vocation. The appointment itself makes it probable that Donne had become an Anglican by this time. Donne became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton. and he became a favourite of both King James I and King Charles I. Donne met and fell in love with Anne More. religious poetry. In 1596 he took part in expeditions led by the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh.

the poems develop as closely reasoned arguments or propositions that rely heavily on the use of the conceit—i. nor do his lines follow the smooth metrics and euphonious sounds of his predecessors. “For Godsake hold your tongue. form. Donne replaced their melliﬂuous lines with a speaking voice whose vocabulary and syntax reﬂect the emotional intensity of a confrontation. From these explosive beginnings. astronomy.” plunging the reader into the midst of an encounter between the speaker and an unidentiﬁed listener. His poems contain few descriptive passages like those in Spenser. it is difﬁcult to date it accurately.7 John Donne
7
Poetry
Because almost none of Donne’s poetry was published during his lifetime. transformed the conceit into a vehicle for transmitting multiple. One consequence of this is a directness of language that electriﬁes his mature poetry. feelings and ideas. particularly that of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. sometimes even contradictory. Even his early satires and elegies. however. And. Most of his poems were preserved in manuscript copies made by and passed among a relatively small but admiring coterie of poetry lovers..” begins his love poem “The Canonization. Donne’s Anniversaries were published in 1611–12 and were the only important poetic works by him published in his lifetime. Donne. Donne’s poetry is marked by strikingly original departures from the conventions of 16th-century English verse. medicine.e. changing again the practice of earlier poets. and philosophical
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. and imagery. an extended metaphor that draws an ingenious parallel between apparently dissimilar situations or objects. politics. and let me love. contain versions of his experiments with genre. global exploration. he drew his imagery from such diverse ﬁelds as alchemy. which derive from classical Latin models.

witty. Like Donne’s poetry. such as the well-known “No man is an Iland. that most powerfully illustrate his mastery of prose. such as the arrival of the king’s personal physician or the application of pigeons to draw vapours from Donne’s head. and deeply moving—explore the basic tenets of Christianity rather than engage in theological disputes. The Devotions correlate Donne’s physical decline with spiritual sickness. however. including Paradoxes and Problems. the most enduring of his prose works. and striking conceits. all occasioned by some event in Donne’s illness. Donne in 1623 wrote Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. and a prayer.7
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disputation.” by which Donne illustrates the unity of all Christians in the mystical body of Christ. Upon recovering from a life-threatening illness. One-hundred and ﬁftysix of them were published by his son in three great folio editions (1640. Each of its 23 devotions consists of a meditation.
Prose
Donne’s earliest prose works. These conceits offer brilliant and multiple insights into the subject of the metaphor and help give rise to the much-praised ambiguity of Donne’s lyrics.
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. the Devotions are notable for their dramatic immediacy and their numerous Metaphysical conceits. candid personal revelations. probably were begun during his days as a student at Lincoln’s Inn. It is Donne’s sermons. and 1661). Donne’s sermons— intellectual. Though composed during a time of religious controversy. 1649. an expostulation. poetic rhythms. the ﬁrst of his theological works. In 1611 Donne completed his Essays in Divinity. until both reach a climax when Donne hears the tolling of a passing bell and questions whether the bell is ringing for him. The power of his sermons derives from their dramatic intensity.

and he befriended young members of the Italian literati. Despite his initial intent to enter the ministry. London?)
Shakespeare. both published later in Poems (1645). London. whose similar humanistic interests he found gratifying. 1608. While in Florence. spending most of his time in Italy. who was under virtual house arrest. Milton turned his attention from poetry to prose. considJohn Milton. Milton did not do so. 8?. He was later reinstated. Invigorated by their admiration for him. While at Cambridge he wrote poems in Latin. In doing so. Milton enrolled at Christ’s College. Together with Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. widely regarded as the greatest epic poem in English. and On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity. Milton also met with Galileo.” or temporarily expelled. it conﬁrms Milton’s reputation as one of the greatest English poets. he corresponded with his Italian friends after his return to England. The Florentine academies especially appealed to Milton. Milton is best known for Paradise Lost. Italian. and in 1632 he received a Master of Arts degree.7 John Milton
7
JOHN MILTON
(b. In 1632–39 he engaged in private study—writing the masque Comus (ﬁrst performed 1634) and the elegy Lycidas (1638)—and toured Europe. 9. A year later he was “rusticated. Milton’s ﬁrst published poem in English. he entered
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English poet and pamphleteer. Cambridge. a situation that has not been fully explained. Nov. Dec.—d. Having returned from abroad in 1639. In 1629 Milton was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree. composed in 1630 and published anonymously in the Second Folio (1632) of Shakespeare’s plays. 1674. Eng. for a period of time because of a conﬂict with one of his tutors. in 1625. Among the most important of these are the companion poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. an signiﬁcant English author afterisWilliam ered the most
. and English. On Shakespeare.

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Images from John Milton’s Paradise Lost underscore the epic poem’s sense of despair and regret. Patterned after the biblical story of Adam and Eve. the work also details Satan’s battle with Jesus for immortal souls. Hulton Archive/Getty Images 94
.

on freedom of the press. He mounted a cogent. and Of Education (1644). informed by the concepts of personal liberty and individual volition. Paradise Lost. It was ﬁrst published in 10 books in 1667 and then in 12 books
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. Milton instead turned to biblical subject matter and to a Christian idea of heroism. was the result.7 John Milton
7
the controversies surrounding the abolition of the Church of England and of the Royalist government. for divorce in four tracts published 1643–45. He also wrote tracts against the Church of England and against the monarchy. at times replying to. it urges the abolition of tyrannical kingship and the execution of tyrants. 1649. considered the greatest epic poem in English. Abandoning an earlier plan to compose an epic on the legendary British king Arthur. composing papers in which national and international affairs of state were addressed. the executive body of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. Milton was appointed secretary for foreign tongues (also called Latin secretary) for the Council of State. and often attacking vehemently. His focus returned to poetry. composed after Milton had become allied to those who sought to form an English republic but probably written before and during the trial of King Charles I though not published until after his death on Jan. His best-known prose is in the pamphlets Areopagitica (1644). After the Restoration he was arrested as a prominent defender of the Commonwealth but was soon released. Milton was entrusted with the duties of translating foreign correspondence. drafting replies. Among the antimonarchical polemics of 1649–55 is The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649). 30. and serving as an apologist for the Commonwealth against attacks from abroad. Thereafter. radical argument. English and Continental polemicists who targeted him as the apologist of radical religious and political dissent. He lost his sight about 1651 and thereafter dictated his works.

it dramatizes the inner workings of the mind of Jesus. if not heroism. Giles Cripplegate Church in London. La Ferté-Milon.7
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in 1674. the father of
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was dramatic historiographer J ean Racinefor hisa mastery ofpoet andclassical tragedy. which was discovered in 1832. in confronting the Godhead. Satan’s deﬁance. he likely died from complications of the gout (possibly renal failure). Milton’s third great long poem. renowned French
. and the interplay of faith and reason in his debates with Satan. Paradise Lost is ultimately not only about the downfall of Adam and Eve but also about the clash between Satan and the Son. which was incomplete when published in 1670. Many readers have admired Satan’s splendid recklessness.000 lines. France—d. 1699. 22. and resourcefulness deﬁne a character who strives never to yield. willfulness. Among prose works published late in Milton’s life or after his death are History of Britain. He was buried inside St. More so than Paradise Lost. Samson Agonistes (1671). Paradise Regained (1671) is a shorter epic in which Christ overcomes Satan the tempter. at a length of almost 11. and an unﬁnished work on theology. It unfolds as a series of debates—an ongoing dialectic—in which Jesus analyzes and refutes Satan’s arguments. his perception. is a dramatic poem in which the Old Testament ﬁgure conquers self-pity and despair to become God’s champion. It uses blank verse and reworks Classical epic conventions to recount the Fall of Man. Though Paradise Regained lacks the vast scope of Paradise Lost. April 21.
JEAN RACINE
(baptized Dec. it fulﬁlls its purpose admirably by pursuing the idea of Christian heroism as a state of mind. Paris)
He was not only a contemporary of Molière. The exact date and location of Milton’s death remain unknown. 1639. anger.

which premiered at the Palais Royal in 1665. His ﬁrst play. and
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. however. Tartuffe (1664. Orphaned at an early age. He cofounded the troupe known as the Illustre Théâtre and toured the French provinces (1645–58). This play was so well received that Racine secretly negotiated with the Hôtel de Bourgogne. Molière hardly slackened his theatrical activity. Le Misanthrope (1666). Molière’s troupe also produced Racine’s next play. His other major plays include L’École des femmes (1662. Racine even seduced Molière’s leading actress. Racine was educated in a Jansenist convent. The Affected Young Ladies). but his career intersected with that of the man who rivalled him for the title of the greatest of all French playwrights. he won acclaim in the court and among bourgeois audiences for his comedy Les Précieuses ridicules (1659. was never produced and has not survived. and he chose drama in deﬁance of his upbringing. The Imaginary Invalid). Alexandre le grand (Alexander the Great). Thérèse du Parc. vanities. After his troupe was established in a permanent theatre in Paris under the patronage of Louis XIV. a rival troupe. into joining him personally and professionally. among others. initially banned by religious authorities). joining forces with the Béjart family. The break with Molière was irrevocable. His plays represent a portrait of all levels of 17th-century French society and are marked by their good-humoured and intelligent mockery of human vices. and Le Malade imaginaire (1673. Born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in 1622 to a prosperous upholsterer.7
Jean Racine
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modern French comedy. to present a “second premiere” of Alexandre. The School for Wives). Molière had left home to become an actor in 1643. writing plays and acting in them. His career as a dramatist began with the production by Molière’s troupe of his play La Thébaïde ou les frères ennemis (“The Thebaide or the Enemy Brothers”) at the Palais-Royal Theatre in 1664. Amasie.

King Theseus. of which he had better command than almost any nonprofessional classicist in France. as well as the occasion to display his expertise in Greek.7
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follies. a relatively uncomplicated plot. Phèdre (1677) is Racine’s supreme accomplishment because of the rigour and simplicity of its organization. The Litigants) offered Racine the opportunity to demonstrate his skill in Molière’s privileged domain. who is horriﬁed. Phaedra declares her love to Hippolytus. Taken ill during a performance in February 1673. Racine. The result. for the rest of his secular tragedies: a love interest. Bérénice marked the decisive point in Racine’s theatrical career. saw her star in his successful Andromaque (1667). without radical alteration. for with this play he found a felicitous combination of elements that he would use. and Bajazet (1672) followed. and a highly poetic use of time. he was buried without ceremony. Hippolytus. a brilliant satire of the French legal system. striking rhetorical passages. Receiving false information that her husband. The great tragedies Britannicus (1669). was an adaptation of Aristophanes’ The Wasps that found much more favour at court than on the Parisian stage. after having made off with Thérèse du Parc in 1665. and the profusion of its images and meanings. the emotional power of its language. Racine presents Phaedra as consumed by an incestuous passion for her stepson. which explored his theme of the tragic folly of passionate love. is dead. The three-act comedy Les Plaideurs (1668. he died of a hemorrhage within a day. after which Phaedra kills herself out of guilt and
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. Bérénice (1670). As he had not been given the sacraments or the opportunity of formally renouncing the actor’s profession. Theseus invokes the aid of the god Neptune to destroy his son. Theseus returns and is falsely informed that Hippolytus has been the aggressor toward Phaedra.

an English dramatist.7 Jean Racine
7
sorrow. and therefore asphyxiatingly tragic. Harbledown?. he died (or the couple separated) soon after. was staged in 1676. ﬁction writer. Abdelazer. 1689. Behn’s early works were tragicomedies in verse. Mme de Maintenon. The Forc’d Marriage. His ﬁnal plays. She returned to England in 1664 and married a merchant named Behn. 1640?. April 16. The play constitutes a daring representation of the contagion of sin and its catastrophic results. After writing his masterpiece. were commissioned by the king’s wife. Kent. who may or may not have sailed with her and the rest of her family to Suriname in 1663. In 1670 her ﬁrst play. which was then an English possession. Her wit and talent having brought her into high esteem. in part because Behn may have deliberately obscured her early life. She was more likely the daughter of a barber. Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691).—d. was produced. and The Amorous Prince followed a year later. Bartholomew Johnson. However. Racine retired to become ofﬁcial historian to Louis XIV. Unrewarded and brieﬂy imprisoned for debt. Her sole tragedy. A structural pattern of cycles and circles in Phèdre reﬂects a conception of human existence as essentially changeless. who traveled in the 1650s with a couple named Amis to Suriname. recurrent. she turned increasingly to light comedy and farce over the course of the
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. she began to write to support herself. One tradition identiﬁes Behn as the child known only as Ayfara or Aphra.
APHRA BEHN
(b. Eng. Racine died in 1699 from cancer of the liver. and poet. London)
A
phra Behn. Her origin remains a mystery. was the ﬁrst Englishwoman known to earn her living by writing. she was employed by King Charles II in secret service in the Netherlands in 1666.

She also wrote poetry. Many of these witty and vivacious comedies. Iga province. the bulk of which was collected in Poems upon Several Occasions. by the turn of the 21st century. as well as the subject matter of her works. Behn’s other ﬁction includes the multipart epistolary novel Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87) and The Fair Jilt (1688). Japan—d. Her short novel Oroonoko (1688) tells the story of an enslaved African prince whom Behn claimed to have known in South America.7
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1670s. or. ﬁrst performed in 1687. and her relative freedom as a professional writer. helped to make it. Behn’s charm and generosity won her a wide circle of friends. with A Voyage to the Island of Love (1684) and Lycidus. presaged the harlequinade. and she often adapted works by older dramatists. The Lover in Fashion (1688). Behn’s versatility. made her the object of some scandal. 1694.
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. The Rover depicts the adventures of a small group of English Cavaliers in Madrid and Naples during the exile of the future Charles II. 28. produced 1677 and 1681). were commercially successful. she wrote other popular works of ﬁction. Nov. and gender. 1644. her best-known work. like her output. Ueno. He greatly enriched the 17-syllable haiku form and made it an accepted medium of artistic expression. was immense. her ﬁction today draws more interest. The Emperor of the Moon. notably The Rover (two parts. Its engagement with the themes of slavery. race.
¯ BASHO
(b. a form of comic theatre that evolved into the English pantomime. as well as its inﬂuence on the development of the English novel. Ōsaka)
B
ashō is the supreme Japanese haiku poet. Though Behn wrote many plays.

Following the Zen philosophy he studied. Bashō—in full Matsuo Bashō. After his lord’s death in 1666. In 1684 Bashō made the ﬁrst of many journeys that ﬁgure so importantly in his work. He attempted to go beyond the stale dependence on form and ephemeral allusions to current gossip that had been characteristic of haiku. His accounts of his travels are prized not only for the haiku that record various sights along the way but also for the equally beautiful prose passages that furnish the backgrounds.7
Bash
7
Interested in haiku from an early age.
The simple descriptive mood evoked by this statement and the comparison and contrast of two independent phenomena became the hallmark of Bashō’s style. disclosing hidden hopes in small things and showing the interdependence of all objects. he gradually acquired a reputation as a poet and critic. Moving to the capital city of Edo (now Tokyo). Instead he insisted that the haiku must be at once unhackneyed and eternal. Bashō abandoned his samurai (warrior) status to devote himself to poetry. Bashō attempted to compress the meaning of the world into the simple pattern of his poetry. which in his day had amounted to little but a popular literary pastime. The Narrow Road to the Deep North). Oku no hosomichi (1694. describing his visit to northern Japan.
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. In 1679 he wrote his ﬁrst verse in the “new style” for which he came to be known:
On a withered branch A crow has alighted: Nightfall in autumn. a pseudonym of Matsuo Munefusa—at ﬁrst put his literary interests aside and entered the service of a local feudal lord. however. is one of the loveliest works of Japanese literature.

a quality found in the verse
Scent of chrysanthemums . simple hermitage that contrasted with the general ﬂamboyance of his times. but he insisted that poets must go beyond mere verbal dexterity and link their verses by “perfume. ﬂaking statues in the old capital. an art in which he so excelled that some critics believe his renga were his ﬁnest work.” and other delicately conceived criteria. the faded. The Narrow Road to Oku (1996). . And in Nara All the ancient Buddhas. provides the original text and a modern-language version by Kawabata Yasunari. When Bashō began writing renga the link between successive verses had generally depended on a pun or play on words.
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. . site of his Bashō-an (“Cottage of the Plantain Tree”). a simple hut from which the poet derived his pen name. which means the love of the old.” “harmony. presents a celebrated linked-verse sequence in which Bashō took part. Bashō maintained an austere. On occasion he withdrew from society altogether. One term frequently used to describe Bashō’s poetry is sabi. along with a commentary. Later men. Donald Keene’s translation of Oku no hosomichi. The Monkey’s Straw Raincoat and Other Poetry of the Basho School (1981).” “echo. Living a life that was in true accord with the gentle spirit of his poetry. honouring both the man and his poetry. retiring to Fukagawa. and the unobtrusive. revered him as the saint of the haiku.7
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On his travels Bashō also met local poets and competed with them in composing the linked verse (renga). a translation by Earl Miner and Hiroko Odagiri.
Here the musty smell of the chrysanthemums blends with the visual image of the dusty.

and nun who came to be known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was an outstanding writer of the Latin American colonial period and of the Hispanic Baroque. For her part. Convent life afforded Sor Juana time to study and write and the opportunity to teach music and drama to the girls in Santa Paula’s school. helped her maintain her exceptional freedom. She moved in 1669 to the more lenient Convent of Santa Paula of the Hieronymite order in Mexico City. 1651?. Viceroyalty of New Spain [now in Mexico]—d. dramatist. Her mother was a Creole and her father Spanish. He invited her to court as a lady-in-waiting in 1664 and later had her knowledge tested by some 40 noted scholars. 1695. given what she called her “total disinclination to marriage” and her wish “to have no ﬁxed occupation which might curtail my freedom to study. notably that of the marquis and marquise de la Laguna from 1680 to 1688. There her prodigious intelligence attracted the attention of the viceroy. Nov. San Miguel Nepantla. marquis de Mancera. Juana’s mother sent the gifted child to live with relatives in Mexico City. The patronage of the viceroy and vicereine of New Spain. April 17. and had her works published in Spain. and there she took her vows. In 1667. favoured her.
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T
. according to a baptismal certiﬁcate. Mexico City)
he poet. Sor Juana amassed one of the largest private libraries in the New World. scholar. 1648.7
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
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SOR JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
(b. They visited her. In her convent cell. She also functioned as the convent’s archivist and accountant. Juana Ramírez de Asbaje was born out of wedlock to a family of modest means in either 1651 or. 12. together with a collection of musical and scientiﬁc instruments. Antonio Sebastián de Toledo.” Sor (Spanish: “Sister”) Juana began her life as a nun with a brief stay in the order of the Discalced Carmelites.

First Dream). Sor Juana’s most signiﬁcant full-length plays involve the actions of daring. and mythological sources. Her many love poems in the ﬁrst person show a woman’s desengaño (“disillusionment”) with love. The Divine Narcissus. became the unofﬁcial court poet in the 1680s. Sor Juana was the last great writer of the Hispanic Baroque and the ﬁrst great exemplar of colonial Mexican culture. She also authored both allegorical religious dramas and entertaining cloakand-dagger plays. Puebla. though cloistered. known as the Primero sueño (1692. and Oaxaca.7
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Sor Juana. Notable in the popular vein are the villancicos (carols) that she composed to be sung in the cathedrals of Mexico City. The short play that introduces her religious drama El divino Narciso (1689. She wrote moral. Sor Juana also occasionally wrote of her native Mexico. Though it is impossible to date much of her poetry. romances (ballad form). and loneliness that it occasions. satiric. is both personal and universal. pain. She employed all of the poetic models then in fashion. given the strife.
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. It employs the convoluted poetic forms of the Baroque to recount the torturous quest of the soul for knowledge. Sor Juana’s most important and most difﬁcult poem. philosophical. and religious lyrics. ingenious women. it is clear that. She drew on a vast stock of Classical. The date of its writing is unknown. biblical. in a bilingual edition) blends the Aztec and Christian religions. Sor Juana wrote secular love lyrics. and so on. jealousy. Her poem Hombres necios (“Foolish Men”) accuses men of the illogical behaviour that they criticize in women. Her various carols contain an amusing mix of Nahuatl (a Mexican Indian language) and Hispano-African and Spanish dialects. including sonnets. Sor Juana celebrated woman as the seat of reason and knowledge rather than passion. along with many poems of praise to court ﬁgures. even after she became a nun.

Yet by 1694 Sor Juana had succumbed in some measure to external or internal pressures. the marquis and marquise de la Laguna. bishop of Puebla. London)
D
aniel Defoe was an English novelist. he also admonished Sor Juana to concentrate on religious rather than secular studies. April 24. Using the female pseudonym of Sister Filotea.7
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Sor Juana achieved considerable renown in Mexico and in Spain. In November 1690. and journalist. 1660. the Respuesta a sor Filotea de la Cruz (“Reply to Sister Filotea of the Cross”).
DANIEL DEFOE
(b. She returned to her previous confessor. and signed various penitential documents. pamphleteer. He remains best known as the author of Robinson Crusoe (1719–22) and Moll Flanders (1722). Sor Juana traces the many obstacles that her powerful “inclination to letters” had forced her to surmount throughout her life.
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. She curtailed her literary pursuits. Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz. published without Sor Juana’s permission her critique of a 40-year-old sermon by the Portuguese Jesuit preacher António Vieira. 1731. The nun’s privileged situation began deﬁnitively to collapse after the departure for Spain of her protectors. Her library and collections were sold for alms. Sor Juana broke with her Jesuit confessor. In the autobiographical section of the document.—d. Eng. Antonio Núñez de Miranda. London. in the early 1680s because he had publicly maligned her. Fernández de Santa Cruz titled the critique Carta atenagórica (“Letter Worthy of Athena”). Sor Juana responded to the bishop of Puebla in March 1691 with her magniﬁcent self-defense and defense of all women’s right to knowledge. With renown came disapproval from church ofﬁcials. renewed her religious vows. Sor Juana died while nursing her sister nuns during an epidemic.

He dealt in many commodities. He suffered further severe losses in 1703. The main reason for his bankruptcy was the loss that he sustained in insuring ships during the war with France—he was one of 19 “merchants insurers” ruined in 1692. after prospering for a while. becoming his leading pamphleteer. in reply to attacks on the “foreign” king.
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. the Glorious. the Review.” as Defoe was to call him—and Defoe supported him loyally. and Good. and he did not actively engage in trade after this time. He wrote this serious. both foreign and domestic. traveled widely at home and abroad. with the pillory garlanded. Great. The ﬁrst of many political pamphlets by him appeared in 1683. when his prosperous brick-and-tile works near Tilbury failed during his imprisonment for political offenses. to write the audacious “Hymn To The Pillory” (1703). The most famous and skillful of all his pamphlets. while awaiting his ordeal. an enormously popular work. This helped to turn the occasion into something of a triumph. Defoe published his vigorous and witty poem The True-Born Englishman. Defoe decided against this. and Kind. Defoe had spirit enough. and the poem on sale in the streets.7
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Although intended for the Presbyterian ministry. With Defoe’s interest in trade went an interest in politics. was published anonymously but resulted in his being ﬁned and sentenced to stand three times in the pillory. and became an acute and intelligent economic theorist. a prosecution that was likely primarily political. Although apprehensive of his punishment. Defoe went bankrupt. He was a supporter of William of Orange—“William. the mob drinking his health. “The Shortest-Way With The Dissenters” (1702). In 1701. driven by an attempt to force him into betraying certain political allies. and by 1683 had set up as a merchant. however. Perhaps Defoe’s most remarkable achievement at this time was his periodical. In 1692.

Here (as in his works of the remarkable year 1722. The Family Instructor (1715). which saw the publication of Moll Flanders. morals. His writings to this point in his career would not necessarily have procured literary immortality for Defoe.7
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forceful. and long-lived paper practically single-handedly from 1704 to 1713. they are all. With George I’s accession (1714). in addition to politics as such. At about this time (perhaps prompted by a severe illness). and so on. imitations. A Journal of the Plague Year. for short periods in 1713. trade.” a label justiﬁed not only by the enormous number of translations. His work undoubtedly had a considerable inﬂuence on the development of later essay periodicals (such as Richard Steele and Joseph Addison’s The Tatler and The Spectator) and of the newspaper press. this he achieved when in 1719 he turned to an extended work of prose ﬁction and (drawing partly on the memoirs of voyagers and castaways such as Alexander Selkirk) produced Robinson Crusoe. religion. But. he wrote the most popular of his many didactic works. in their different ways. At ﬁrst a weekly. and adaptations that have appeared but by the almost mythic power with which Defoe creates a hero and a situation with which every reader can in some sense identify. it became a thriceweekly publication in 1705. and Defoe continued to produce it even when. and Colonel Jack) Defoe displays his ﬁnest gift as a novelist—his insight into human nature. It was. effectively. they all struggle. it is true. through a
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. A German critic has called it a “world-book. in one sense or another. The men and women he writes about are all. his political enemies managed to have him imprisoned again on various pretexts. Defoe discussed current affairs in general. manners. the main government organ. solitaries. Defoe continued to write for the government of the day and to carry out intelligence work. placed in unusual circumstances.

to seek security in England. direct style. obsessive. he remained active and enterprising as a writer. Ire. Nov. he wrote such shorter works as A Tale of a Tub (1704) and A Modest Proposal (1729). Dublin)
he Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift is among the foremost prose satirists in the English language. 30. based in large part on his visits to Scotland.7
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life that is a constant scene of jungle warfare. In 1692 he received the degree of M. enters into their minds and analyzes their motives. 1667. writing always in the ﬁrst person. holds the reader’s interest. and Defoe.—d. Dublin. In 1724–26 were published the three volumes of Defoe’s animated and informative Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. 1745. They are also ordinary human beings. 19. however.
JONATHAN SWIFT
(b. circumscribed world. but within that range he is a novelist of considerable power. Roxana. the latter may seem unselective. despite failing health. His novels are given verisimilitude by their matterof-fact style and their vivid concreteness of detail. Besides the celebrated novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726). to some extent. In 1724 he published his last major work of ﬁction. Dublin. especially at the time of the Act of Union in 1707. where he was granted his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1686 and continued in residence as a candidate for his Master of Arts degree until 1689. and his plain. a Protestant. as in almost all of his writing.
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. Defoe’s range is narrow. at the University of Oxford. Oct. though in the closing years of his life. But the Roman Catholic disorders that had begun to spread through Dublin after the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) in Protestant England caused Swift. but it effectively helps to evoke a particular. In 1682 Swift entered Trinity College. they all become.A.

who was then going to Ireland as a lord justice. A momentous period began for Swift when. Between 1691 and 1694 Swift wrote a number of poems. 1702. Swift returned to Dublin as chaplain and secretary to the earl of Berkeley. A Tale of a Tub. But his true genius did not ﬁnd expression until he turned from verse to prose satire and composed. but Swift was uneasy about many policies of the Whig administration. he took orders in the Anglican church. but he was also passionately loyal to the Anglican church. this work is outstanding for its exuberance of satiric wit and energy and is marked by an incomparable command of stylistic effects. During the ensuing years he was in England on some four occasions—in 1701. Swift quickly became the Tories’
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. a series of letters written between his arrival in England in 1710 and 1713. After 1699. John (later Viscount Bolingbroke) was replacing that of the Whigs. He was a Whig by birth. Swift’s reactions to such a rapidly changing world are vividly recorded in his Journal to Stella. 1703. between 1696 and 1699. and political principle. His public writings of this period show that he kept in close touch with affairs in both Ireland and England. education. notably six odes. he once again found himself in London. Swift’s works brought him to the attention of a circle of Whig writers led by Joseph Addison. Published anonymously in 1704. and 1707 to 1709—and won wide recognition in London for his intelligence and his wit as a writer. largely in the nature of parody. A Tory ministry headed by Robert Harley (later earl of Oxford) and Henry St. being ordained priest in January 1695. and he came to view with apprehension the Whigs’ growing determination to yield ground to the Nonconformists.7 Jonathan Swift
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During a return visit to Ireland. in 1710. Early in 1700 he was preferred to several posts in the Irish church. The astute Harley made overtures to Swift and won him over to the Tories.

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chief pamphleteer and political writer. He was rewarded for his services in April 1713 with his appointment as dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. With the accession of George I, the Tories were a ruined party, and Swift’s career in England was at an end. He withdrew to Ireland, where he was to pass most of the remainder of his life. After a period of seclusion, Swift gradually regained his energy. He turned again to verse, which he continued to write throughout the 1720s and early ’30s, producing the impressive poem Verses on the Death of Doctor Swift, among others. By 1720 he was also showing a renewed interest in public affairs. In his Irish pamphlets of this period he came to grips with many of the problems, social and economic, then confronting Ireland. Of his Irish writings, A Modest Proposal remains perhaps the best known. It is a grimly ironic letter of advice in which a public-spirited citizen suggests that Ireland’s overpopulation and dire economic conditions could be alleviated if the babies of poor Irish parents were sold as edible delicacies to be eaten by the rich. Swift’s greatest satire, Gulliver’s Travels, was published in 1726. It is uncertain when he began this work, but it appears from his correspondence that he was writing in earnest by 1721 and had ﬁnished the whole by August 1725. Its success was immediate. This work, which is told in Gulliver’s “own words,” is the most brilliant as well as the most bitter and controversial of his satires. In each of its four books the hero, Lemuel Gulliver, embarks on a voyage, but shipwreck or some other hazard usually casts him up on a strange land. Gulliver’s Travels’s matter-of-fact style and its air of sober reality confer on it an ironic depth that defeats oversimple explanations. Is it essentially comic, or is it a misanthropic depreciation of humankind? Pulling in different directions, this irony creates the tensions that are characteristic of Swift’s best work, and reﬂects his
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vision of humanity’s ambiguous position between bestiality and reasonableness. Swift remained active throughout most of the 1730s—Dublin’s foremost citizen and Ireland’s great patriot dean. In the autumn of 1739 a great celebration was held in his honour. He had, however, begun to fail physically and later suffered a paralytic stroke, with subsequent aphasia. After his death in 1745, he was buried in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

VOLTAIRE
(b. Nov. 21, 1694, Paris, France—d. May 30, 1778, Paris)

V

oltaire (the pseudonym of François-Marie Arouet) is one of the greatest of all French writers, known especially as a courageous crusader against tyranny, bigotry, and cruelty. He studied law but abandoned it to become a writer. After the death of Louis XIV, in 1715, under the morally relaxed Regency, Voltaire became the wit of Parisian society, and his epigrams were widely quoted. In 1718, after the success of Oedipe, the ﬁrst of his tragedies, he was acclaimed as the successor of the great classical dramatist Jean Racine and thenceforward adopted the name of Voltaire. (The origin of this pen name remains doubtful.) He continued to write for the theatre all his life. Voltaire was twice imprisoned in the Bastille for his remarks and in 1726 was exiled to England, where his philosophical interests deepened; he also learned English, and to the end of his life he was able to speak and write it ﬂuently. He returned to France in 1728 or 1729. His epic poem La Henriade (1728) was well received, but his lampoons of the Regency and his liberal religious opinions caused offense. His Lettres philosophiques (1734) spoke out against established religious and political systems: they contrast
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Although he began a law career and was also a noted philosopher, Voltaire achieved his greatest success as a writer. Through his poems and plays, he became an advocate for the downtrodden and oppressed in his native France. Hulton Archive/Getty Images 112

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the Empiricist psychology of the English philosopher John Locke with the conjectural lucubrations of the French philosopher René Descartes. A philosopher worthy of the name disdains empty, a priori speculations, Voltaire argues; he instead observes the facts and reasons from them. The frankness of Voltaire’s attack created an uproar. When a warrant of arrest was issued in 1734, he ﬂed Paris and settled at Cirey in Champagne with Mme du Châtelet, who became his patroness and mistress. There he continued his theatrical writing, and he also turned to scientiﬁc research and the systematic study of religions and culture. Because of a lawsuit, he followed Mme du Châtelet to Brussels in May 1739, and thereafter they were constantly on the move between Belgium, Cirey, and Paris. After her death, in 1749, he spent periods in Berlin and Geneva; in 1754 he settled in Switzerland, and in 1758 he bought Ferney, a property on the Swiss border which, together with Tourney in France, enabled him, by crossing the frontier, to safeguard himself against police incursion from either country. A period of intense and wide-ranging work followed, and there was scarcely a subject of importance on which he did not speak. In addition to his many works on philosophical and moral problems, he wrote contes (“tales”), including Zadig (1747), which is a kind of allegorical autobiography in which the Babylonian sage Zadig, like Voltaire, suffers persecution, is pursued by ill fortune, and ends by doubting the tender care of Providence for human beings, and Micromégas (1752), which measures the littleness of man in the cosmic scale. His best-known work, Candide (1759), is a satire on philosophical optimism. In it, the youth Candide, disciple of Doctor Pangloss (himself a disciple of the philosophical optimism of Leibniz), saw and suffered such misfortune that he was unable to believe that this was “the best of all possible worlds.” Having
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retired with his companions to the shores of the Propontis, he discovered that the secret of happiness was “to cultivate one’s garden,” a practical philosophy excluding excessive idealism and nebulous metaphysics. Voltaire’s fame was now worldwide. As the “Innkeeper of Europe,” as he was called, he welcomed such literary ﬁgures as James Boswell, Giovanni Casanova, Edward Gibbon, the Prince de Ligne, and the fashionable philosophers of Paris. He kept up an enormous correspondence—with the Philosophes, with his actresses and actors, and with those high in court circles, such as the duc de Richelieu (grandnephew of the Cardinal de Richelieu), the duc de Choiseul, and Mme du Barry, Louis XV’s favourite. He renewed his correspondence with Frederick II and exchanged letters with Catherine II of Russia. His main interest at this time, however, was his opposition to l’infâme, a word he used to designate the church, especially when it was identiﬁed with intolerance. Voltaire’s epic poetry, lyrical verse, and plays are virtually unknown today, but his contes are continually republished, and his letters are regarded as one of the great monuments of French literature. Yet it was the theatre that brought Voltaire back to Paris in 1778. Wishing to direct the rehearsals of Irène, he made his triumphal return to the city he had not seen for 28 years. His health was profoundly impaired by the ensuing excitement, and he died several months later.

enry Fielding was a novelist and playwright who is considered one of the founders of the English novel.

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He began his literary career as a playwright who wrote satirical plays often targeting political corruption of the times. The passage in 1737 of the Licensing Act, by which all new plays had to be approved and licensed by the Lord Chamberlain before production, ended this work. Fielding then became a barrister but had little success. He probably wrote Shamela (1741), a burlesque of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela that he never claimed. Fielding’s Joseph Andrews also satirizes Pamela, with Joseph, Pamela’s virtuous footman brother, resisting the attempts of a highborn lady to seduce him. The parodic intention soon becomes secondary, and the novel develops into a masterpiece of sustained irony and social criticism. At its centre is Parson Adams, one of the great comic ﬁgures of literature. Fielding explains in his preface that he is writing “a comic Epic-Poem in Prose.” He was certainly inaugurating a new genre in ﬁction. Journalistic work after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 made Fielding a trusted supporter of the government. His reward came in 1748, when he was appointed justice of the peace (or magistrate) for Westminster and Middlesex, with his own courthouse, which was also his residence, in Bow Street in central London. Together with his blind half brother, John Fielding, also a magistrate, he turned an ofﬁce without honour—it carried no salary—into one of great dignity and importance and established a new tradition of justice and the suppression of crime in London. Among other things, Fielding strengthened the police force at his disposal by recruiting a small body of able and energetic “thieftakers”—the Bow Street Runners. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), with its great comic gusto, vast gallery of characters, and contrasted scenes of high and low life in London and the provinces, has always constituted the most popular of his works. Like

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its predecessor, Joseph Andrews, it is constructed around a romance plot. The hero, whose true identity remains unknown until the denouement, loves the beautiful Sophia Western, and at the end of the book he wins her hand. Numerous obstacles have to be overcome before he achieves this, however, and in the course of the action the various sets of characters pursue each other from one part of the country to another, giving Fielding an opportunity to paint an incomparably vivid picture of England in the mid-18th century. The introductory chapters at the beginning of each book make it clear how carefully Fielding had considered the problem of planning the novel. No novelist up until then had so clear an idea of what a novel should be, so that it is not surprising that Tom Jones is a masterpiece of literary engineering. Amelia (1751), a much more sombre work, anticipates the Victorian domestic novel, being a study of the relationship between a man and his wife. It is also Fielding’s most intransigent representation of the evils of the society in which he lived, and he clearly ﬁnds the spectacle no longer comic.

amuel Johnson, an English critic, biographer, essayist, poet, and lexicographer, is regarded as one of the greatest ﬁgures of 18th-century life and letters. Johnson was the son of a poor bookseller. In 1728 he entered Pembroke College, Oxford. He stayed only 13 months, until December 1729, because he lacked the funds to continue. Johnson then became undermaster at Market Bosworth grammar school in 1732 but was unhappy there;

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There had been earlier English dictionaries.7 Samuel Johnson
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with only £20 inheritance from his father. A year later Johnson began his long association with The Gentleman’s Magazine. and deﬁnitions. Johnson’s other works include The V anity of Human Wishes (1749). he left his position with the feeling that he was escaping prison. which was eventually published in two volumes in 1755—six years later than planned. in which he excelled. In addition to giving etymologies. intended as a preliminary sample of his work. The work culminated in his editing an edition of Shakespeare. Johnson illustrated usage with quotations drawn almost entirely from writing from the Elizabethan period to his own time. though their friendship was not without its strains. with a wide range of poetry and prose. David Garrick. Johnson edited and annotated the text and wrote a preface. In 1735 Johnson married Elizabeth Porter. was his ﬁrst signiﬁcant Shakespeare criticism. The school soon proved a failure. a widow 20 years his senior. In 1746 he wrote The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language and signed a contract for A Dictionary of the English Language. One of his students. the following year. but none on the scale of Johnson’s. his most impressive poem as well as the ﬁrst
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. His wife’s marriage settlement enabled him to open a school in Edial. and he and Garrick left for London in 1737. which appeared in eight volumes in 1765. but remarkably quickly for so extensive an undertaking. His Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth (1745). would become the greatest English actor of the age and a lifelong friend. In the mid-1740s he began to work toward two of his major literary accomplishments. however. not the strong point of Johnson and his contemporaries. which remains his greatest work of literary criticism. near Lichﬁeld. often considered the ﬁrst modern magazine.

His many essays appeared in the periodicals The Rambler (1750–52). in order to be able to pay for the funeral of his mother. which was conceived modestly as short prefatory notices to an edition of English poetry but which expanded in scope so that Johnson’s prefaces alone ﬁlled the ﬁrst 10 volumes (1779–81) and the poetry grew to 56 volumes. His subsequent works include A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775). which he wrote in 1759. during the evenings of a single week.D. and 10 years later he was awarded the Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of Oxford. The Life of Samuel Johnson. made it popular. 1758–60). Through his Dictionary. In the early 1770s Johnson wrote a series of political pamphlets supporting positions favourable to the government but in keeping with his own views. though a number of his contemporaries did. and the long ﬁction Rasselas (originally published as The Prince of Abissinia: A Tale). and Prefaces. LL. among others. Dublin. Biographical and Critical. (1791). he helped invent what we now call “English Literature. his edition of Shakespeare. perhaps. Johnson. the most signiﬁcant part of his writings. and The Universal Chronicle (in a series known as The Idler.”
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. based on travels with Boswell. to the Works of the English Poets (conventionally known as The Lives of the Poets). the most frequently quoted of English writers—his criticism is. after Shakespeare. James Boswell’s consistent use of the title in his famous biography of Johnson. The Literary Magazine (from 1756). He never referred to himself as Dr. In 1765 Johnson received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Trinity College. While Johnson is well remembered for his aphorisms— which contributed to his becoming.7
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work published with his name. and his Lives of the Poets in particular.

In the literary culture of the German-speaking countries. if not since Dante’s The Divine Comedy. 28. novelist. he had now emerged from his Christian period.7
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
(b. Goethe is the only German literary ﬁgure whose range and international standing equal those of Germany’s supreme philosophers (who have often drawn on his works and ideas) and composers (who have often set his works to music). 1749. his writings have been described as “classical. broadly understood. statesman. though eminently stageworthy when suitably edited. His Faust. 1832. he has had so dominant a position that. He could be said to stand in the same relation to the culture of the era that began with the Enlightenment and continues to the present day as William Shakespeare does to the culture of the Renaissance and Dante to the culture of the High Middle Ages. However. Saxe-Weimar)
and amateur artist. and for his dissertation he chose a potentially shocking subject from ecclesiastical law concerning the nature of ancient Jewish
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. Frankfurt am Main [Germany]—d.
Early Works
From April 1770 until August 1771 Goethe studied in Strasbourg for the doctorate. is also Europe’s greatest long poem since John Milton’s Paradise Lost. March 22. scientist. theatre director. He is considered the greatest German literary ﬁgure of the modern era. critic. playwright.
J ohann Wolfgang von Goethe was a poet. Weimar. since the end of the 18th century.” In a European perspective he appears as the central and unsurpassed representative of the Romantic movement. Aug.

He later returned to Frankfurt. It also contains. Götz was not published immediately but became known to a few friends in manuscript. It was eventually translated by Sir Walter Scott. dramatisirt (“The History of Gottfried von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand. which questioned the status of the Ten Commandments. and he took instead the Latin oral examination for the licentiate in law (which by convention also conferred the title of doctor). proved too scandalous to be accepted. The dissertation. who was inspired by Goethe’s example to think of using his own local history as the material for his novels. focusing on the weak-willed Weislingen. written in two months early in 1774. mainly fragments. There he created a ﬁrst draft over six weeks in the autumn of 1771 of Geschichte Gottfriedens von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand. It was almost immediately translated into French and in 1779 into English. poured out. already well-connected at the cultivated local court of Darmstadt. as perhaps he intended. The years from 1773 to 1776 proved to be the most productive period in Goethe’s life. He thereby effectively became part of the literary movement subsequently known as the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”). notably Prussia and Austria. however. appeared that autumn and captured the imagination of a generation.7
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religion. Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther). poems and other works. an invented love-intrigue. Dramatized”). a man who is unable to remain faithful to a worthy woman and betrays his class origins for the sake of a brilliant career. later titled simply Götz von Berlichingen. was asked to start reviewing for a new intellectual Frankfurt journal. which was hostile to the enlightened despotism of the German princely states. The uncompromising
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. the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen (“Frankfurt Review of Books”). and Goethe.

all but dried up. the novel tells the story of a gifted young man who aims for stardom in a reformed German national theatrical culture. Thereafter. In a rough-and-tumble. His presence helped to establish Weimar as a literary and intellectual centre. however. Goethe arrived at Weimar. At ﬁrst the plot was transparently autobiographical. for the rest of his life. which had been getting thinner. ironic way. he continued to produce original and substantial works—particularly. and the ﬂow of poetry. and his literary output suffered. Much moral outrage was generated by a work that appeared to condone both adultery and suicide. but Goethe’s own development gradually diverged from that of his hero. after an invitation to visit the court of the young new duke of Weimar. each year until 1785. Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung (The Theatrical Mission of Wilhelm Meister). For 10 years Goethe turned away completely
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. in 1779. and the novel remained in manuscript during his lifetime.7 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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concentration on the principal character’s viewpoint—no one else’s letters are communicated to the reader—permits the depiction from within of emotional and intellectual disintegration and partly accounts for the strength of the public reaction. He kept himself going as a writer by forcing himself to write one book of a novel. a prose drama. he would remain there. he found it increasingly difﬁcult to complete anything.
A Change in Perspective
In 1775. Until 1780. reminiscent of the English novelist Henry Fielding. Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris). on the whole. but for 35 years Goethe was known in the ﬁrst instance as the author of Werther. where he accepted an appointment to the ducal court. But Goethe was never entirely at ease in his role of Weimar courtier and ofﬁcial.

as Emma. the ambassador’s wife and Lord Nelson’s mistress. in 1789. die Metamorphose der Pﬂanzen zu erklären (“Essay in Elucidation of the Metamorphosis of Plants”. As a geologist. an attempt to show that all plant forms
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. Sir William Hamilton. experiencing the benign climate and fertile setting in which human beings and nature were in harmony. Eng. Lady Hamilton. he turned to science. in which Homer’s Odyssey seemed not fanciful but realistic. His return to Weimar in June 1788 was extremely reluctant. What Goethe came to value most about this time was not the opportunity of seeing ancient and Renaissance works of art and architecture ﬁrsthand but rather the opportunity of living as nearly as possible what he thought of as the ancient way of life. and the actress who was later to be. He consulted others about his own drawing and joined the circle of the British ambassador in Naples. In Sicily he had reached a landscape impregnated with a Greek past. A drama failed. Versuch. he tinkered with satires and translations.
New Ventures
By his 40th birthday. later he even toyed with the idea that Homer might have been a Sicilian. Perhaps by way of compensation. Goethe had all but completed the collected edition of his works. away from the court and its pressures and disappointments. he visited Pompeii and Herculaneum. In 1790 he published his theory of the principles of botany. the last lengthy work of his to be printed before the silence was Stella in 1776. as a connoisseur of ancient art. he climbed Vesuvius. Goethe spent most of the years from 1786 to 1788 in Italy. trans. in Goethe’s Botany). but he seems not to have known where to go next as a poet.7
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from publishing.

In 1794 the poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller suggested that he and Goethe should collaborate on a new journal. from a literary point of view. the leaf. a completely new scientiﬁc issue began to obsess him: the theory of colour. which ceased publication after three years. he had lost “the half of my existence. trans. in conversation and writing. Convinced that Newton was wrong to assume that white light could be broken into light of different colours. as well as those of their contemporaries. with Schiller dead. intended to give literature a voice in an age increasingly dominated by politics. and for over 10 years they discussed each other’s works and projects. which was closer.7
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are determined by a process of alternating expansion and contraction of a basic unit. In The Horae he published a collection of short stories. longer. Eng. however. and on a higher level than any comparable friendship in world literature. But in early 1805 Schiller and Goethe both fell seriously ill. Perhaps it had served its purpose simply by initiating the collaboration with Goethe. which was acceptable but unexciting. which were found scandalous. Both proﬁted incalculably from the relationship. In 1791. which ran to over a thousand letters. Goethe proposed a new approach of his own. Die Horen (The Horae). The German Refugees). Goethe recovered but felt that. and serialized a translation of the autobiography of Florentine Mannerist artist Benvenuto Cellini. and the Roman Elegies. which were found tedious. The friendship with Schiller began a new period in Goethe’s life. Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (“Conversations of German Émigrés”. The poets began a correspondence.”
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. Schiller soon lost interest in the journal. in some ways one of the happiest and. one of the most productive. Schiller died.

no ﬁrm evidence survives. in the relatively peaceful interval after the Austrian war against France in 1809. perhaps including his ultimate redemption. regarding it as a more or less legitimate successor to the Holy Roman Empire. He wrote a fourth section of his autobiography. the Ausgabe letzter Hand (“Edition of the Last Hand”). initially in 40 volumes. after the overthrow of Napoleon’s dominion by allied troops at the Battle of Leipzig (1813). Of a possible plan in 1769 to dramatize the story of the man who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for earthly fulﬁllment. He prepared a ﬁnal collected edition of his works. Zweiter Römischer Aufenthalt (1829. “Second Sojourn in Rome”). Alienation from the modern age is the undertone in all his work of this period.7
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In 1806 Napoleon routed the Prussian armies at the Battle of Jena. and above all he wrote part two of Faust. completing the story of his life up to his departure for Weimar in 1775. 12 miles from the battle. though Goethe’s house was spared. a new serenity entered his writing. In 1808 he met Napoleon during the Congress of Erfurt and was made a knight of the Legion of Honour. he compiled an account of his time in Rome in 1787–88. of which only a few passages had been drafted in 1800. indeed probably unparalleled literary achievement by a man of advanced age. and. But that ended during the years 1814–17. Weimar. Work on Faust accompanied Goethe throughout his adult life. was subsequently occupied and sacked.
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. The ﬁrst published version. He became reconciled to Napoleon’s rule. thanks to Napoleon’s admiration for the author of Werther.
Later Years
In his ﬁnal years he experienced a time of extraordinary.

its richness. having caught a cold. with Faust: Part One following in 1808 and Faust: Part Two in 1832. and he read most of the important 18th-century English writers as well as Shakespeare. a poetic reckoning with Goethe’s own times. Alloway. in a sense. Scot. complexity. Dumfries. and literary daring began to be appreciated only in the 20th century. He received some formal schooling from a teacher as well as sporadically from other sources. Ayrshire. Proud. and full of a nameless ambition. He was also famous for his amours and his rebellion against orthodox religion and morality. Watching his father die a worn-out and bankrupt man in 1784 helped to make Burns both a rebel against the social order of his day and a bitter satirist of all forms of religious and political thought that condoned or perpetuated inhumanity.7
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Faust: ein Fragment. His knowledge of Scottish literature was conﬁned in his childhood to orally transmitted folk songs and folk tales together with a modernization of the late 15th-century poem W allace. 1759.
ROBERT BURNS
(b. He acquired a superﬁcial reading knowledge of French and a bare smattering of Latin. In the spring of 1832. he died of a heart attack. Jan. Part Two is. As with much of Goethe’s later work. July 21. 1796. wrote lyrics and songs in the Scottish dialect of English.—d. Milton. and Dryden. 25. with their irresistible dynamism and their alienation from his Classical ideal of fulﬁlled humanity. appeared in 1790. restless. The year 1829 brought celebrations throughout Germany of Goethe’s 80th birthday. considered the national poet of Scotland. the young Burns did his share of hard work on his family’s
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. Dumfriesshire)
R
obert Burns.

his entries in the commonplace book that he had begun in 1783 reveal that from the beginning he was interested in the technical problems of versiﬁcation. After a number of amorous and other adventures there and several trips to other parts of Scotland. Dumfriesshire. there were six gloomy and histrionic poems in English. or amusement or his ironical contemplation of the social scene. Burns was a conscious craftsman. The Death and Dying Words of Poor Maillie. The Holy Fair. too. Its success with simple country folk and sophisticated Edinburgh critics alike was immediate and overwhelming. To a Louse. Though he wrote poetry for his own amusement and that of his friends. Chieﬂy in the Scottish Dialect in 1786. But these were not spontaneous effusions by an almost-illiterate peasant. Scotch Drink. In addition. It included a handful of ﬁrst-rate Scots poems: The Twa Dogs. “It Was Upon a Lammas Night. including a number of verse letters addressed to various friends. Burns remained dissatisﬁed. patronized. and showered with well-meant but dangerous advice. of which only one. At Edinburgh. but little of signiﬁcance was added. four songs.7
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farm. and some others. In Edinburgh Burns had met James Johnson.” showed promise of his future greatness as a song writer. To a Mouse. In the midst of personal and economic troubles he published Poems. Burns moved to Edinburgh in 1786 and was lionized. He developed rapidly throughout 1784 and 1785 as an “occasional” poet who more and more turned to verse to express his emotions of love. An Address to the Deil. a keen collector of Scottish songs who was bringing out a series of volumes of songs with the music and who enlisted
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. he arranged for a new and enlarged edition (1787) of his Poems. friendship. he settled in the summer of 1788 at a farm in Ellisland.

but Thomson was a more consciously genteel person than Johnson. though the chorus and probably the ﬁrst stanza are old. Many songs which. Burns spent the latter part of his life in assiduously collecting and writing songs to provide words for traditional Scottish airs. Burns was enthusiastic and soon became virtual editor of Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum.
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. Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum (1787–1803) and the ﬁrst ﬁve volumes of Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs for the Voice (1793–1818) contain the bulk of Burns’s songs. sometimes writing several sets of words to the same air in an endeavour to ﬁnd the most apt poem for a given melody. and Burns had to ﬁght with him to prevent him from “reﬁning” words and music and so ruining their character. editing. and it is his songs that have carried his reputation around the world. as Thomson set it to another tune. and rewriting items. it is clear from a variety of evidence. in addition to carrying out his duties as exciseman. He obtained a post in the excise service in 1789 and moved to Dumfries in 1791. Later. where he lived until his death. Burns is without doubt the greatest songwriter Great Britain has produced. (Burns wrote it for a simple and moving old air that is not the tune to which it is now sung. must have been substantially written by Burns he never claimed as his. He never claimed “Auld Lang Syne. which he described simply as an old fragment he had discovered. He wrote numerous “occasional” poems and did an immense amount of work for the two song collections.” for example. It is by his songs that Burns is best known.7
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Burns’s help in ﬁnding. but the song we have is almost certainly his. He wrote all his songs to known tunes. improving.) The full extent of Burns’s work on Scottish song will probably never be known. he became involved with a similar project for George Thomson.

children. helped launch the English Romantic movement. beggars. There Wordsworth became friends with a fellow poet. After graduation and another brief trip to France. virtually penniless. vagrants. Their partnership was rooted in one marvelous year (1797–98) in which they “together wantoned in wild Poesy. Repelled by the competitive pressures there. and victims of England’s wars who began to march through the sombre poems he began writing at this time. Cumberland. near Bristol. entered St. 1770. Wordsworth.”
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. There he was caught up in the passionate enthusiasm that followed the fall of the Bastille and became an ardent republican sympathizer. Westmorland)
W
illiam Wordsworth was an English poet whose Lyrical Ballads (1798). Eng. The most important thing he did in his college years was to devote his summer vacation in 1790 to a long walking tour through revolutionary France. This dark period ended in 1795. 1850. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. he elected to idle his way through the university. Rydal Mount. orphaned at age 13. John’s College. April 7.7
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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
(b. Wordsworth found himself unprepared for any profession.—d. Cockermouth. and they formed a partnership that would change both poets’ lives and alter the course of English poetry. and bitterly hostile to his own country’s opposition to the French. when a friend’s legacy made possible Wordsworth’s reunion with his beloved sister Dorothy—the two were never again to live apart—and their move in 1797 to Alfoxden House. written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He lived in London in the company of radicals like William Godwin and learned to feel a profound sympathy for the abandoned mothers. Cambridge in 1787. rootless. April 23.

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Stimulated by Coleridge and under the healing inﬂuences of nature and his sister. and other elements of “Nature’s holy plan. and new subjects for poetry.
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. or. In the company of Dorothy. Some of these were affectionate tributes to Dorothy. These poems appeared in 1798 in a slim. Growth of a Poet’s Mind. Wordsworth spent the winter of 1798–99 in Germany. Many of these short poems were written to a daringly original program formulated jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Upon his return to England— where he took possession of Dove Cottage. and which was eventually published in 1850 under the title The Prelude. which opened with Coleridge’s long poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and closed with Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey. some were tributes to daffodils. up to 1799. Westmorland. anonymously authored volume entitled Lyrical Ballads.” and some were portraits of simple rural people intended to illustrate basic truths of human nature. About 1798 Wordsworth began writing the autobiographical poem that would absorb him intermittently for the next 40 years. Wordsworth began to compose the short lyrical and dramatic poems for which he is best remembered. and aimed at breaking the decorum of Neoclassical verse. birds. where he was to reside for eight of his most productive years—Wordsworth incorporated several new poems in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800). All but three of the intervening poems were Wordsworth’s. The manifesto and the accompanying poems thus set forth a new style. The Prelude extends the quiet autobiographical mode of reminiscence that Wordsworth had begun in Tintern Abbey and traces the poet’s life from his school days through his university life and his visits to France. all of them foreshadowing 20th-century developments. a new vocabulary. at Grasmere.

but ﬂashes of brilliance can appear in revisions added when the poet was in his seventies. Wordsworth’s last years were given over partly to “tinkering” his poems. and ﬁve years later they settled at Rydal Mount. 1818–20. as the family called his compulsive and persistent habit of revising his earlier poems through edition after edition. went through four distinct manuscript versions (1798–99. the best known of which is On the Power of Sound.
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. The Prelude. where Wordsworth spent the remainder of his life. 1805–06. Poems. In 1813 he accepted the post of distributor of stamps for the county of Westmorland. In his middle period Wordsworth invested a good deal of his creative energy in odes. The Brothers and Michael. These poems. in Two Volumes (1807). Through all these years Wordsworth was assailed by vicious and tireless critical attacks by contemptuous reviewers. Most readers ﬁnd the earliest versions of The Prelude and other heavily revised poems to be the best. He also produced a large number of sonnets. and 1832–39) and was published only after the poet’s death in 1850. near Ambleside. help to make up what is now recognized as his great decade.7
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notably two tragic pastorals of country life. together with the brilliant lyrics that were assembled in Wordsworth’s second verse collection. for instance. But by the mid-1830s his reputation had been established with both critics and the reading public. In 1808 Wordsworth and his family moved from Dove Cottage to larger quarters in Grasmere. Wordsworth succeeded his friend Robert Southey as Britain’s poet laureate in 1843 and held that post until his own death in 1850. stretching from his meeting with Coleridge in 1797 until 1808. most of them strung together in sequences.

a Scots equivalent of the English solicitor (attorney). The poem’s clear and vigorous storytelling. poet. 1832. The Chase. Roxburgh)
he Scottish novelist. and biographer Sir Walter Scott is often considered both the inventor and the greatest practitioner of the historical novel. Scott led a highly active literary and social life during these years. Bürger. Edinburgh. He had become a partner in a printing (and later publishing) ﬁrm owned by James Ballantyne and
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T
. and Latin. 1ST BARONET
(b. The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805). and William and Helen (1796). historian. was a translation of two ballads by the German Romantic balladeer G. and Scottish border ballads. 1771. In 1786 Scott was apprenticed to his father as writer to the signet. His ﬁrst published work.—d. Gothic novels. In the mid-1790s Scott became interested in German Romanticism. His attempts to “restore” the orally corrupted versions back to their original compositions sometimes resulted in powerful poems that show a sophisticated Romantic ﬂavour.A. 15. The work made Scott’s name known to a wide public. and he followed up his ﬁrst success with a full-length narrative poem. but his ﬁnances now took the ﬁrst of several disastrous turns. and vivid evocations of landscape were repeated in further poetic romances. (1802–03). honest pathos. Sept. 21. French.7
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SIR WALTER SCOTT. His study and practice of law were somewhat desultory. German. which was the most successful of these pieces. 3 vol. which ran into many editions. Scottish regionalist elements. Aug. Scott’s interest in border ballads ﬁnally bore fruit in his collection of them entitled Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Spanish. for his immense youthful energy was diverted into social activities and miscellaneous readings in Italian. including The Lady of the Lake (1810). Abbotsford. Scot.

from that time onward everything he wrote was done partly in order to make money and pay off the lasting debts he had incurred. a novel set in 12thcentury England and one that remains his most popular book. That year he rediscovered the unﬁnished manuscript of a novel he had started in 1805. as were all of the many novels he wrote down to 1827. set
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. which he stocked with enormous quantities of antiquarian objects. The book was published anonymously. These immensely popular novels. Another ruinous expenditure was the country house he was having built at Abbotsford. it reinterpreted and presented with living force the manners and loyalties of a vanished Scottish Highland society. include Guy Mannering (1815) and The Antiquary (1816). ornate. In W averley and succeeding novels Scott’s particular literary gifts—as a born storyteller and a master of dialogue who possessed a ﬂair for picturesque incidents and a rich. A story of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. which he titled W averley. These were followed by the masterpieces Rob Roy (1817) and The Heart of Midlothian (1818). The ﬁrst of four series of novels published under the title Tales of My Landlord was composed of The Black Dwarf and the masterpiece Old Mortality (1816). seemingly effortless literary style—could be utilized to their fullest extent. and in the early summer of 1814 he wrote with extraordinary speed almost the whole of his novel. By 1813 this ﬁrm was hovering on the brink of ﬁnancial disaster. Two more masterpieces were Kenilworth (1821). and then by The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose (both 1819).7
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his irresponsible brother John. He then turned to themes from English history and elsewhere and wrote Ivanhoe (1819). By 1813 Scott had begun to tire of narrative poetry. now known as the W averley novels. which with W averley completed a sort of trilogy covering the period from the 1740s to just after 1800. and although Scott saved the company from bankruptcy.

and the highly successful Quentin Durward (1823). written
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. 1834.7
Sir Walter Scott. though his rapidity and ease of writing remained largely unimpaired. Ottery St. Mary. critic. He was taken home and died in 1832.000. and he was generally revered as the grand old man of English letters. The best of his later novels are Redgauntlet (1824) and The Talisman (1825). and he tried a continental tour with a long stay at Naples to aid recovery. the latter being set in Palestine during the Crusades. When Constable was unable to meet his liabilities and went bankrupt. Scott’s immense earnings in those years contributed to his ﬁnancial downfall. Scott assumed personal responsibility for both his and the Ballantynes’ liabilities and thus dedicated himself for the rest of his life to paying off debts amounting to about £120. set in 15th-century France. the Ballantynes. as did his popularity. Eager to own an estate and to act the part of a bountiful laird. and his agents. near London)
S
amuel Taylor Coleridge was an English lyrical poet. His Lyrical Ballads. Eng. however. Archibald Constable. 1772. Devonshire. The result was reckless haste in the production of all his later books and compulsive work whose strain shortened his life. he dragged down the Ballantynes and Scott in his wake because their ﬁnancial interests were inextricably intermingled. In 1831 his health deteriorated sharply. Scott’s creditors were not hard with him during this period. Highgate. 21.—d.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
(b. Oct. he anticipated his income and involved himself in exceedingly complicated and ultimately disastrous ﬁnancial agreements with his publisher. In 1827 Scott’s authorship of the Waverley novels was ﬁnally made public. 1st Baronet
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in Elizabethan England. and philosopher. July 25.

with whom he had become acquainted in 1795. eventually aborted. In 1791 Coleridge entered Jesus College. Coleridge’s intellect ﬂowered in an extraordinary manner during this period. heralded the English Romantic movement. The exotic imagery and rhythmic chant of this poem have led many critics to conclude that it should be read as a
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.7
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with William Wordsworth. according to his own account. Together they entered upon one of the most inﬂuential creative periods of English literature. he was then bought out by his brothers and restored to Cambridge. he went to London and enlisted as a dragoon under the assumed name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. best exempliﬁed by Frost at Midnight. to set up a utopian community in Pennsylvania. Despite his unﬁtness for the life. Coleridge. Coleridge was developing a new. he remained until discovered by his friends. with their general agreement on the unity of God and the immortality of the soul. While these speculations were at their most intense. Despite these difﬁculties. and his Biographia Literaria (1817) is the most signiﬁcant work of general literary criticism produced in the English Romantic period. Cambridge. oppressed by ﬁnancial difﬁculties. which was expressed particularly through the phenomena of human genius. In his third year there. A chance meeting with the poet Robert Southey led to a close association between the two men and a plan. as he embarked on an investigation of the nature of the human mind. That poem was an element of Coleridge’s exploration of the possibility that all religions and mythical traditions. sprang from a universal life consciousness. informal mode of poetry in which he could use a conversational tone and rhythm to give unity to a poem. composed under the inﬂuence of laudanum the mysterious poetic fragment known as Kubla Khan. joined by William Wordsworth.

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“meaningless reverie. and opium retained its powerful hold on him. After Coleridge read the 17th-century archbishop Robert Leighton’s commentary on the First Letter of Peter. In spite of this. the writings that survive from this period are redolent of unhappiness. he hoped to ﬁnd a ﬁrm point of reference that would both keep him in communication with orthodox Christians of his time (thus giving him the social approval he always needed. even if only from a small group of friends) and enable him to pursue his former intellectual explorations
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. The placing of it at the beginning of Lyrical Ballads (1798) was evidently intended by Coleridge and Wordsworth to provide a context for the sense of wonder in common life that marks many of Wordsworth’s contributions. tells how a sailor who has committed a crime against the life principle by slaying an albatross suffers from torments. became his “ofﬁcial” creed. written many years before. there also appear signs of a slow revival. his most famous poem. was also produced at Drury Lane with the title Remorse in January 1813. infused with supernatural elements. He split with Wordsworth. By aligning himself with the Anglican church of the 17th century at its best.” but it is. Christianity. he drew upon the ballad form. physical and mental. The main narrative. with self-dramatization veering toward self-pity. composed during the autumn and winter of 1797–98. in which the nature of his crime is made known to him. Coleridge was enabled to explore similar themes in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Coleridge’s play Osorio. For this. a complex poem about the nature of human genius. hitherto one point of reference for Coleridge. The decade following the publication of Lyrical Ballads were troubled years for Coleridge. however. A course of lectures on Shakespeare he delivered during the winter of 1811–12 attracted a large audience. like Frost at Midnight.

In 1830 he joined the controversy that had arisen around the issue of Catholic Emancipation by writing his last prose work. On the Constitution of the Church and State. Coleridge’s achievement has been given more widely varying assessments than that of any other English literary artist. 1775.
JANE AUSTEN
(b. Hampshire)
Austen is the English writer gave the novel J anedistinctly modern character who ﬁrst her treatment its through
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. and literary criticism. For the general reader Biographia Literaria is a misleading volume. though there is broad agreement that his enormous potential was never fully realized in his works.7
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in the hope of reaching a Christian synthesis that might help to revitalize the English church both intellectually and emotionally. 1817. July 18. abstruse philosophical discussion. He drew together a collection of his poems (published in 1817 as Sibylline Leaves) and wrote Biographia Literaria (1817). But over the whole work hovers Coleridge’s veneration for the power of imagination. The third edition of Coleridge’s Poetical Works appeared in time for him to see it before his ﬁnal illness and death in 1834. a rambling and discursive but highly inﬂuential work in which he outlined the evolution of his thought and developed an extended critique of Wordsworth’s poems. 16. since it moves bewilderingly between autobiography. One effect was a sense of liberation and an ability to produce large works again. Hampshire. Steventon. His ﬁnal decades were more settled years. Eng.—d. Winchester. His election as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1824 brought him an annuity and a sense of recognition. Dec.

Austen also created the comedy of manners of middle-class life in the England of her time in her novels. short novels. with occasional visits to Bath and to London—that she was to use in the settings. Cassandra. famed for her impromptu verses and stories. Austen was born in the Hampshire village of Steventon. verses. where her father. was rector.7 Jane Austen
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of ordinary people in everyday life. There
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. her experience was carried far beyond Steventon rectory by an extensive network of relationships by blood and friendship. who also remained unmarried. but the next morning changed her mind. characters. She was the seventh child in a family of eight. notably sentimental ﬁction. Her passage to a more serious view of life from the exuberant high spirits and extravagances of her earliest writings is evident in Lady Susan. and other prose and show Austen engaged in the parody of existing literary forms. the neighbourhood. and the country town. In 1802 it seems likely that Austen agreed to marry Harris Bigg-Wither. Their father was a scholar who encouraged the love of learning in his children. was a woman of ready wit. Cassandra. His wife. and subject matter of her novels. Her earliest-known writings date from about 1787. Moreover. a short novel-in-letters written about 1793–94 (and not published until 1871). It was this world—of the minor landed gentry and the country clergy. in the village. Jane Austen’s lively and affectionate family circle provided a stimulating context for her writing. The great family amusement was acting. Her closest companion throughout her life was her elder sister. These contain plays. and between then and 1793 she wrote a large body of material that has survived in three manuscript notebooks. the Reverend George Austen. the 21-year-old heir of a Hampshire family.

poems. She remains a beloved author to this day. Austen’s productivity is rivaled only by her longevity. and short stories as a young lady and continued storytelling until her ﬁnal illness made it impossible.7 The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time
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Jane Austen penned plays. Hulton Archive/Getty Images 140
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Both of the leading reviews.” In 1803 the manuscript of “Susan” was sold to the publisher Richard Crosby for £10. probably under the title “Susan. the evidence is unsatisfactory and incomplete. and she began to prepare Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice for publication. In 1797 her father wrote to offer it to a London publisher for publication. Austen’s brother Edward was able in 1809 to provide his mother and sisters with a large cottage in the village of Chawton. not far from Steventon. Mansﬁeld Park. The earliest of her novels. He took it for immediate publication. The prospect of settling at Chawton had already given Austen a renewed sense of purpose. anonymously. the Critical Review and the Quarterly Review. Unfortunately. Two years later Thomas Egerton agreed to publish Sense and Sensibility. although it was advertised. welcomed its blend of instruction and amusement. which was ﬁnished in 1813 and published in 1814. After years of unsettled lodgings. unaccountably it never appeared during her lifetime. Meanwhile. as a result of the family’s move to Bath. Sense and Sensibility.7
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are also a number of mutually contradictory stories connecting her with someone with whom she fell in love but who died very soon after. was written about 1798 or 1799. in 1811 Austen had begun the most serious of her novels. but the offer was declined. within his Hampshire estate. Between January 1814 and March 1815 she wrote Emma. Since Austen’s novels are so deeply concerned with love and marriage. there is some point in attempting to establish the facts of these relationships. which came out. the last of the early novels. but. in November 1811. was begun about 1795. Northanger Abbey. Between October 1796 and August 1797 Austen completed the ﬁrst version of Pride and Prejudice. which appeared in
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. Pride and Prejudice seems to have been the fashionable novel of its season.

For the last 18 months of her life. and six days later she was buried in Winchester Cathedral.7
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December 1815. Greece)
L
ord Byron was a British Romantic poet and satirist whose poetry and personality captured the imagination of Europe. Jan. In April she made her will. who supervised the publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. and in May she was taken to Winchester to be under the care of an expert surgeon.—d. of her novels it is the most consistently comic in tone. Cambridge. 6TH BARON BYRON
(b. and Emma. in December 1817. This novel remained unﬁnished owing to Austen’s declining health. London.
GEORGE GORDON BYRON. at a discreet royal command. April 19. His
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. where he piled up debts at an alarming rate and indulged in the conventional vices of undergraduates there. In 1805 Byron entered Trinity College. she was busy writing. Missolonghi. 22. was “respectfully dedicated” to him. Eng. In January 1817 she began Sanditon. Persuasion (written August 1815–August 1816) was published posthumously. She had the satisfaction of seeing her work in print and well reviewed and of knowing that the novels were widely read. 1788. She died on July 18. a robust and selfmocking satire on health resorts and invalidism. The years after 1811 seem to have been the most rewarding of her life. 1824. with Northanger Abbey. Her authorship was announced to the world at large by her brother Henry. They were so much enjoyed by the Prince Regent (later George IV) that he had a set in each of his residences. There was no recognition at the time that regency England had lost its keenest observer and sharpest analyst.

In March 1812. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. which he continued in Athens. Besides furnishing a travelogue of Byron’s own wanderings through the Mediterranean. Turkey). Byron apparently entered into intimate relations with his half sister Augusta. 6th Baron Byron
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ﬁrst published volume of poetry. He then carried on a ﬂirtation with Lady Frances Webster as a diversion from this dangerous liaison. The agitations of these two love affairs and the sense of mingled guilt and exultation they aroused in Byron are reﬂected in a series of gloomy and remorseful verse tales he wrote at this time. which sold 10. In March 1810 he sailed for Constantinople (now Istanbul. the ﬁrst two cantos express the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. and swam the Hellespont (present-day Dardanelles) in imitation of Leander. including The Corsair (1814). Byron proposed in September 1814 to Anne Isabella (Annabella)
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. and Byron “woke to ﬁnd himself famous. in which he attacked the contemporary literary scene.7 George Gordon Byron.” The poem describes the travels and reﬂections of a young man who. Hours of Idleness. visited the site of Troy. appeared in 1807. disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry. and then embarked on a grand tour of Europe. In Greece Byron began Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage. In 1809 Byron took his seat in the House of Lords. now married to Colonel George Leigh.000 copies on the day of publication. Seeking to escape his love affairs in marriage. A sarcastic critique of the book in The Edinburgh Review provoked his retaliation in 1809 with a couplet satire. the ﬁrst two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage were published by John Murray. looks for distraction in foreign lands. During the summer of 1813. This work gained him his ﬁrst recognition.

Byron went abroad in April 1816. Shelley and other visitors in 1818 found Byron grown fat. Byron transformed the legendary libertine Don Juan into an unsophisticated. Claire Clairmont. The ﬁrst two cantos of Don Juan were begun in 1818 and published in July 1819. amid swirling rumours centring on his relations with Augusta Leigh and his bisexuality. and Godwin’s stepdaughter by a second marriage. Augusta Ada.7
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Milbanke. perhaps predictably. a poem in ottava rima that satirically contrasts Italian with English manners. which. innocent young man who. remains a rational norm against which to view the absurdities and irrationalities of the world. in December 1815. The marriage took place in January 1815. He also wrote Beppo. Annabella soon after left Byron to live with her parents. Don Juan. At the end of the summer the Shelley party left for England. Wounded by the general moral indignation directed at him. and Lady Byron gave birth to a daughter. never to return to England. gathering impressions that he recorded in a fourth canto of Childe Harold (1818). where Claire gave birth to Byron’s illegitimate daughter Allegra in January 1817. a satire in the form of a picaresque verse tale. follows Harold from Belgium up the Rhine River into Switzerland. But a chance
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. In the light. though he delightedly succumbs to the beautiful women who pursue him. looking older than his years. with whom Byron had begun an affair in England. In Geneva he wrote the third canto of Childe Harold (1816). near Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin. mock-heroic style of Beppo Byron found the form in which he would write his greatest poem. and sunk in sexual promiscuity. In May he arrived in Rome. with hair long and turning gray. who had eloped. Byron sailed up the Rhine River into Switzerland and settled at Geneva.

reputedly the bravest of the Greeks.7 George Gordon Byron. near Horsham. at sea off Livorno. it and a number of other works were published in 1821. 4. Byron wrote cantos III. who initiated him into the secret society of the Carbonari and its revolutionary aims to free Italy from Austrian rule. Eng. He made efforts to unite the various Greek factions and took personal command of a brigade of Souliot soldiers. From April 1823 Byron aided the Greeks in their struggle for independence from the Turks. 1792. and V of Don Juan at this time. His body was brought back to England and. refused burial in Westminster Abbey. Sussex. Between
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. respectively. Deeply mourned. But a serious illness in February 1824 weakened him. he became a symbol of disinterested patriotism and a Greek national hero. 6th Baron Byron
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meeting with Countess Teresa Gamba Guiccioli. Field Place. reenergized Byron and changed the course of his life. IV. Tuscany [Italy])
P
ercy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet whose passionate search for personal love and social justice was gradually channeled from overt actions into poems that rank with the greatest in the English language. after Byron quarrelled with his publisher. Bysshe (pronounced “Bish”) Shelley. Shelley was the heir to rich estates acquired by his grandfather. was placed in the family vault near Newstead. Aug.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
(b. who was only 19 years old and married to a man nearly three times her age. July 8.—d. After collaborating with Shelley and Leigh Hunt on a periodical. Byron’s attention wandered. Cantos VI to XVI of Don Juan were published in 1823–24 by Hunt’s brother John. Counts Ruggero and Pietro Gamba. and in April he contracted the fever from which he died. 1822. He won the friendship of her father and brother.

he was expelled the following year. and marriage) but ends with resplendent hopes for humanity when freed from these vices. Against Godwin’s objections. During this memorable summer. he betrayed the acquisitive plans of his grandfather and father. with whom Claire had begun an affair. and her older sister Eliza Westbrook went to Dublin. Following travels through France. Shelley. In June 1813 Harriet Shelley gave birth to their daughter Ianthe. and Germany. Shelley composed the poems “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc. Shelley’s party returned
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. the younger daughter of a London tavern owner. and freethinking ideals. who tried to starve him into submission but only drove the strongwilled youth to rebel against the established order.7
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the spring of 1810 and that of 1811. they returned to London. By mid-May 1816. Lack of money ﬁnally drove Shelley to moneylenders in London. and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont hurried to Geneva to intercept Lord Byron. his ﬁrst major poem—a nine-canto mixture of blank verse and lyric measures that attacks the evils of the past and present (commerce. Early in 1812. Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook. Oxford. the eating of meat. monarchy.” and Mary began her novel Frankenstein. the church. daughter of William Godwin and his ﬁrst wife. Mary. Shelley. where Shelley circulated pamphlets advocating political rights for Roman Catholics. by marrying her. the novel for which she would become best known. née Mary Wollstonecraft. he published two Gothic novels and two volumes of juvenile verse. war. 1814. where in 1813 he issued Queen Mab. but a year later Shelley fell in love with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Shelley and Mary Godwin eloped to France on July 27. where they were shunned by the Godwins and most other friends. Switzerland. Harriet. Late in August 1811. autonomy for Ireland. In the fall of 1810 Shelley entered University College.

Because Shelley’s health suffered from the climate and his ﬁnancial obligations outran his resources. In March 1817 the Shelleys settled near Peacock at Marlow. where Byron was residing. unable to reshape the world to conform to his vision. he concentrated on embodying his ideals within his poems. Late in the year. He completed this drama during the summer of 1819. it is a less notable achievement than Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama. Thus far. In November. Shelley’s literary career had been politically oriented. Harriet Shelley drowned herself in London. After revisions. In early 1818–19 Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound and outlined The Cenci. and moral ambiguities still make The Cenci theatrically effective. Memorable characters. violated the laws against blasphemous libel. it was reissued in 1818 as The Revolt of Islam. which Shelley completed at Florence in the autumn of 1819. powerful and evocative language. who feared that Shelley’s idealized tale of a peaceful national revolution.
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. They compiled History of a Six Weeks’ Tour jointly from the letters and journals of their trips to Switzerland. the keystone of Shelley’s poetic achievement. Even so. bloodily suppressed by a league of king and priests. The Revolution of the Golden City and Mary Shelley ﬁnished Frankenstein. 1816. where Shelley wrote his twelve-canto romanceepic Laon and Cythna. the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont went to Italy. Shelley deepened his understanding of art and literature and. 30. settling in Bath. But in Italy. a tragedy on the Elizabethan model based on a case of incestuous rape and patricide in sixteenth-century Rome. classic ﬁveact structure. Shelley and Mary were married with the Godwins’ blessing. or.7
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to England in September. far from the daily irritations of British politics. and on Dec. Both plays appeared about 1820. Laon and Cythna was suppressed by its printer and publisher.

Shelley drowned on July 8. 1821. he reasserted his uncompromising idealism. His essay A Defence of Poetry (published 1840) eloquently declares that the poet creates humane values and imagines the forms that shape the social order: thus each mind recreates its own private universe. and “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World. 23. however. Feb. 31. Her Journal is a rich source of Shelley biography. After her husband’s death. Rome. 1795. a dark fragment on which he was at work until he sailed to Leghorn to welcome his friend Leigh Hunt. when his boat sank during the stormy return voyage to Lerici. who had arrived to edit a periodical called The Liberal. Eng. a convent-bound young admirer. and his prose works. In 1821. By 1840 she had disseminated his fame and most of his writings.7
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After moving to Pisa in 1820. Mary Shelley returned to England and devoted herself to publicizing Shelley’s writings and educating their only surviving child.
JOHN KEATS
(b. 1822.” After the Shelleys moved to Lerici in 1822. Epipsychidion (in couplets) mythologizes his infatuation with Teresa (“Emilia”) Viviani. and her letters are an indispensable adjunct. London. Percy Florence Shelley. Oct. with long and invaluable notes.—d. She published her late husband’s Posthumous Poems (1824) and also edited his Poetical Works (1839). Shelley was stung by hostile reviews into expressing his hopes more guardedly. Papal States [Italy])
English Romantic lyric J ohn Keats was an life to the perfection ofpoet who devoted his short a poetry
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. into a Dantesque fable of how human desire can be fulﬁlled through art. Percy Shelley began The Triumph of Life.

at Guy’s and St. Keats received relatively little formal education. great sensuous appeal. but he broke off his apprenticeship in 1814 and went to live in London. followed by a similar attack on Endymion in the Quarterly Review. Thomas’ hospitals. was published in March 1817. The poem narrates a version of the Greek legend of the moon goddess Diana’s (or Cynthia’s) love for Endymion. Poems. In 1817 Keats began work on Endymion. The son of a livery-stable manager. On his return to London a brutal criticism of his early poems appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine. After 1817 he devoted himself entirely to poetry. and its verse is composed in loose rhymed couplets. Contrary to later assertions. This work is divided into four 1. Keats’s ﬁrst book. Keats met these reviews with
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. and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend. His ﬁrst mature poem is the sonnet On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer (1816). or junior house surgeon. He was apprenticed to a surgeon in 1811. In the summer of 1818 Keats went on a walking tour in the Lake District (of northern England) and Scotland. The volume is remarkable only for some delicate natural observation and some obvious Spenserian inﬂuences. which was inspired by his excited reading of George Chapman’s classic 17th-century translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey.7
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marked by vivid imagery.000-line sections. but Keats put the emphasis on Endymion’s love for Diana rather than on hers for him and thus transformed the tale to express the widespread Romantic theme of the attempt to ﬁnd in actuality an ideal love that has been glimpsed heretofore only in imaginative longings. where he worked as a dresser. a mortal shepherd. and his exposure and overexertions on that trip brought on the ﬁrst symptoms of the tuberculosis of which he was to die. which appeared in 1818. his ﬁrst long poem.

The odes are Keats’s most distinctive poetic achievement.7
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a calm assertion of his own talents. This theme is taken up more distinctly in the Ode on a Grecian Urn. and the transience of youth and beauty—strongly brought home to Keats in recent months by the death of one of his brothers. But there were family troubles. and intellectual. The ﬁgures of the lovers depicted on the Greek urn become for him the symbol of an enduring but unconsummated passion that subtly belies the poem’s celebrated conclusion. It was during the year 1819 that all his greatest poetry was written—Lamia. Hyperion. marked by careful and considered development. and all ye need to know. which makes it into a different poem. a near neighbour in Hampstead. To Psyche. To a Nightingale. The relation with Brawne had a decisive effect on Keats’s development. and he went on steadily writing poetry. The Eve of St. In the Ode to a Nightingale a visionary happiness in communing with the nightingale and its song is contrasted with the dead weight of human grief and sickness. with whom he soon fell hopelessly and tragically in love. emotional. and it is an astonishing body of work. On Melancholy. The Eve of St. “Beauty is truth.” Keats’s fragmentary poetic epic. the second being a revision of the ﬁrst with the addition of a long prologue in a new style. and To Autumn). This poetry was composed under the strain of illness and his growing love for Brawne.—that is all ye know on earth. truth beauty. Hyperion was begun in the autumn
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. Written in the ﬁrst ﬂush of his meeting with Brawne. exists in two versions. and Keats also met Fanny Brawne. Agnes may be considered the perfect culmination of Keats’s earlier poetic style. technical. Agnes. the great odes (On Indolence. it conveys an atmosphere of passion and excitement in its description of the elopement of a pair of youthful lovers. On a Grecian Urn. and the two versions of Hyperion.

In 1817 Pushkin accepted a post in the foreign ofﬁce at St. 29 [Feb. and all that there is of the ﬁrst version was ﬁnished by April 1819. Petersburg)
he Russian poet. when he reached Rome. in the face of increasing illness and frustrated love. and short-story writer Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin has often been considered his country’s greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. the unsuccessful culmination of a Russian revolutionary movement in its earliest stage. 1837. 10]. For these political poems. He realized that it was his death warrant. he had a relapse and died there. to come to terms with the conﬂict between absolute value and mortal decay that appears in other forms in his earlier poetry. novelist. In his political verses and epigrams. These two versions cover the period of Keats’s most intense experience. dramatist. Agnes. and from that time sustained work became impossible. The Eve of St. and Hyperion and the odes were all published in the famous 1820 volume. 1799. widely circulated in manuscript. the one that gives the true measure of his powers. The poem is his last attempt. Petersburg in May 1820 to a remote southern province.
ALEKSANDR PUSHKIN
(b. an exclusive literary circle founded by his uncle’s friends.
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. Petersburg. where he was elected to Arzamás. St. Pushkin was banished from St. both poetical and personal. Keats sailed for Italy in September 1820. New Style]. The poems Isabella. Lamia.7
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of 1818. May 26 [June 6. and by the beginning of 1820 the evidence of tuberculosis was clear. he made himself the spokesman for the ideas and aspirations of those who were to take part in the Decembrist rising of 1825. Jan. Russia—d. He had been increasingly ill throughout 1819. Moscow.

and the masses. Ukraine). The characters it depicts and immortalizes—Onegin. a profoundly affectionate study of Russian womanhood—are typically Russian and are shown in relationship to the social and environmental forces by which they are molded. the novel in verse Yevgeny Onegin (1833). Written just before the Decembrist uprising. he was there taken ill. the romantic. near Pskov. Lensky. the heroine. He wrote the provincial chapters of Yevgeny Onegin as well as one of his major works.7
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Sent ﬁrst to Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk. The impressions he gained provided material for his “southern cycle” of romantic narrative poems. at the other end of Russia. headed by the tsar. freedom-loving poet. In May 1823 he started work on his central masterpiece. published 1820–23. Yevgeny Onegin unfolds a panoramic picture of Russian life. and Pushkin was hailed as the leading Russian poet of the day. Alone and isolated. his ﬁrst major work. Ruslan and Ludmila). Boris Godunov treats the burning question of the relations between the ruling classes. it is the moral
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. he traveled in the northern Caucasus and later to the Crimea. Although this cycle of poems conﬁrmed the reputation of the author of Ruslan i Lyudmila (1820. the disenchanted skeptic. they were to prove one of his most productive periods. on which he continued to work intermittently until 1831. During this period the speciﬁcally Russian features of his poetry became steadily more marked. Remarks in letters intercepted by police resulted in Pushkin being exiled to his mother’s estate of Mikhaylovskoye. While convalescing. Although the two years at Mikhaylovskoye were unhappy for Pushkin. and Tatyana. he came to know the peasants on the estate and interested himself in noting folktales and songs. the historical tragedy Boris Godunov (1831). he himself was not satisﬁed with it. he embarked on a close study of Russian history.

that without the support of the people. During a long conversation between them. seen triumphing over the waves. “the judgment of the people. is the cause of his grief. among other works. aware of Pushkin’s immense popularity and knowing that he had taken no part in the Decembrist “conspiracy.” whose example he held up to the present tsar in. the struggle against autocracy was doomed.” allowed him to return to Moscow in the autumn of 1826. and characterization make this outstanding play a revolutionary event in the history of Russian drama. Pushkin saw. despite the episodic construction. the tsar met the poet’s complaints about censorship with a promise that in the future he himself would be Pushkin’s censor and told him of his plans to introduce several pressing reforms from above and.” The poem’s descriptive and emotional powers give it an
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. the poem Medny vsadnik (1837. “on the tsar’s initiative. The poem describes how the “little hero.” Yevgeny.” This is the reason for his persistent interest in the age of reforms at the beginning of the 18th century and in the ﬁgure of Peter the Great. in particular. detail. Yevgeny threatens him. He considered that the only possible way of achieving essential reforms was from above. In a climax of growing horror. driven mad by the drowning of his sweetheart. The Bronze Horseman). to prepare the way for liberation of the serfs. however. the new tsar Nicholas I. the “tsar-educator. wanders through the streets. Seeing the bronze statue of Peter I seated on a rearing horse and realizing that the tsar. After the suppression of the Decembrist uprising.” that Pushkin emphasizes.7 Aleksandr Pushkin
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and political signiﬁcance of the latter. he is pursued through the streets by the “Bronze Horseman. Pushkin’s ability to create psychological and dramatic unity. and to heighten the dramatic tension by economy of language.

as is shown in particular by the most important of his prose works. which he was now obliged to lead and which his wife enjoyed. Besançon. The social life at court. Paris)
V
ictor Hugo was a poet. Though regarded in France as one of that country’s greatest poets. France—d. In 1831. and his repeated petitions to be allowed to retire to the country and devote himself entirely to literature were all rejected.
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. His art acquired new dimensions. It was during this period that Pushkin’s genius came to its fullest ﬂowering. Alongside the theme of Peter the Great. Pushkin was mortally wounded defending his wife’s honour in a duel forced on him by inﬂuential enemies. the historical novel of the Pugachov Rebellion. the motif of a popular peasant rising acquired growing importance in his work. 26. The Captain’s Daughter).7
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unforgettable impact and make it one of the greatest in Russian literature. 1885. was ill-suited to creative work. Kapitanskaya dochka (1836. he is better known abroad for such novels as Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Misérables (1862). Petersburg. In court circles he was regarded with mounting suspicion and resentment. In 1837. despite his being surveilled by the police and struggling against the tsar’s censorship. May 22. Feb. Once more he took up government service. however.
VICTOR HUGO
(b. novelist. 1802. Pushkin married Natalya Nikolayevna Goncharova and settled in St. and the most important of the French Romantic writers. and dramatist. but he stubbornly continued to write. and almost every one of the many works written between 1829 and 1836 opened a new chapter in the history of Russian literature.

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). which became
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. an evocation of life in medieval Paris during the reign of Louis XI. With his verse drama Cromwell (1827). partly because of the demands of society and political life but also as a result of personal loss: his daughter Léopoldine. He found relief above all in working on a new novel. he wished to write parts for a young and beautiful actress. with whom he had begun a liaison in 1833. Hugo gained wider fame in 1831 with his historical novel Notre-Dame de Paris (Eng. 25. after three unsuccessful attempts. was accidentally drowned with her husband in September 1843.7
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The son of a general. In this play Hugo extolled the Romantic hero in the form of a noble outlaw at war with society. Le Roi s’amuse (1832. heaps misery on the hunchback Quasimodo and the gypsy girl Esmeralda. trans. So intense was Hugo’s creative activity in the 1830s and 1840s that he also continued to pour out plays. gained victory for the young Romantics over the Classicists in what came to be known as the battle of Hernani. Juliette Drouet. Eng. Hugo’s literary achievement was recognized in 1841 by his election. he emerged as an important ﬁgure in Romanticism. The ﬁrst of these plays was another verse drama. to the French Academy and by his nomination in 1845 to the Chamber of Peers. Hugo was an accomplished poet before age 20. on Feb. From this time he almost ceased to publish. second. trans. dedicated to a passionate love and driven on by inexorable fate. though immensely long and almost impossible to stage. in the persons of Frollo the archdeacon and Phoebus the soldier. recently married. 1830. The production of his verse tragedy Hernani. he needed a platform for his political and social ideas. and. The novel condemns a society that. The King’s Fool). There were two motives for this: ﬁrst.

with the easy consciousness of authority. The story centres on the convict Jean Valjean. which contains the purest of his poetry. Its extraordinary success with readers of every type when it was published in 1862 brought him instant popularity in his own country. put down his insights and prophetic visions in prose and verse. Hugo’s republican views drove him into exile—at ﬁrst enforced. published in 1862 after work on it had been set aside for a time and then resumed. Les Misérables is a vast panorama of Parisian society and its underworld.7
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Les Misérables. becoming at last the genial grandfather of popular literary portraiture and the national poet who gave his name to a street in every town in France.” but English translations generally carry the French title. among the most powerful satirical poems in the French language. it is said that he wrote each morning 100 lines of verse or 20 pages of prose. he went on to assume the role of an outlawed sage who. and it contains many famous episodes and passages.
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. “The Punishments”). a victim of society who has been imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread. laureate and peer of France in 1845.” as he was described in 1830. Les Misérables. and its speedy translation into many languages won him fame abroad. among them a chapter on the Battle of Waterloo and the description of Jean Valjean’s rescue of his daughter’s husband by means of a ﬂight through the sewers of Paris. and Les Contemplations (1856). including Les Châtiments (1853. then voluntary—between 1851 and 1870. During this exile he produced the most extensive part of all his writings and the most original.” or “the outcasts. The novel’s name means “the wretched. Hugo’s enormous output is unique in French literature. “The most powerful mind of the Romantic movement. Hugo then returned to prose and took up his abandoned novel.

“My Kinsman. such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. One of the greatest ﬁction writers in American literature.H. which he published at his own expense in 1825. His ﬁrst novel. however.—d. Twice-Told Tales. Mass. Salem. 1804. and by 1830 he had published such impressive and distinctive stories as “The Hollow of the Three Hills” and “An Old Woman’s Tale. His ﬁrst signed book. in Concord made the village the centre of the philosophy of Transcendentalism. but he had little to say to
T
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.” two of his greatest tales—and among the ﬁnest in the language—had appeared.” By 1832. Hawthorne. style. Henry Thoreau.)
he American novelist and short-story writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was a master of the allegorical and symbolic tale. upon graduation from Bowdoin College. soon found his own voice. Hawthorne’s writing had brought him a sufﬁcient income to allow him to marry Sophia Peabody. U. Plymouth. Hawthorne did not distinguish himself as a young man.7
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NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
(b. “Young Goodman Brown. he is best known for The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). was published in 1837..” The presence of some of the leading social thinkers and philosophers of his day. the couple rented the Old Manse in Concord and began a happy period that Hawthorne would later record in his essay “The Old Manse. and subjects.” perhaps the greatest tale of witchcraft ever written. Fanshawe. N. 1864. and Bronson Alcott.S. Major Molineux” and “Roger Malvin’s Burial. he considered a failure. Hawthorne welcomed the companionship of his Transcendentalist neighbours. appeared in 1835. he spent nearly a dozen years reading and trying to master the art of writing ﬁction. By 1842. Instead. May 19. July 4.

Hawthorne moved to Lenox. There he began work on The House of the Seven Gables (1851). the story of the Pyncheon family. who for generations had lived under a curse until it was removed at last by love. he ﬁnally retreated to a seaside town in England and quickly produced The Marble Faun.) The Scarlet Letter tells the story of two lovers kept apart by the ironies of fate. located in the mountain scenery of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. In writing it. The book made Hawthorne famous and was eventually recognized as one of the greatest of American novels. In a few months of concentrated effort in 1848. Determined to leave Salem forever. their own mingled strengths and weaknesses. although important for the younger writer and his work. In 1853. His new short-story collection. and then he spent a year and a half sightseeing in Italy. was much less so for Hawthorne. This friendship. The position was terminated in 1857. where he had been appointed to the position of surveyor of the Custom House. he produced his masterpiece. At Lenox he enjoyed the stimulating friendship of Herman Melville. when his friend Franklin Pierce assumed the presidency of the United States. he drew heavily upon the experiences and impressions he had
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. Hawthorne was appointed to a consulship in Liverpool. is apparent in “The Custom House” essay preﬁxed to the novel. who lived in nearby Pittsﬁeld. Lancashire. Mosses from an Old Manse.7
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them. and the Puritan community’s interpretation of moral law. (The bitterness he felt over his dismissal from the Salem Custom House in 1848. The Scarlet Letter. Determined to produce yet another romance. appeared in 1846. a year after he had moved to Salem. until at last death unites them under a single headstone. which had been a political appointment.

Hawthorne’s work initiated the most durable tradition in American ﬁction.7
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recorded in a notebook kept during his Italian tour to give substance to an allegory of the Fall of Man. Hawthorne’s high rank among American ﬁction writers is the result of at least three considerations. 7.)
E
dgar Allan Poe was an American short-story writer. a theme that had usually been assumed in his earlier works but that now received direct and philosophic treatment. His tale The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) initiated the modern detective story. Hawthorne devoted himself entirely to his writing but was unable to make any progress with his plans for a new novel. His hair turned white. his handwriting changed. First. third. His greatest short stories and The Scarlet Letter are marked by a depth of psychological and moral insight seldom equaled by any American writer. The drafts of unﬁnished works he left are mostly incoherent. second. that of the symbolic romance that assumes the universality of guilt and explores the complexities and ambiguities of man’s choices. He died in his sleep on a trip with Pierce in search of health. its clarity.S. and editor who is famous for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre. U.—d. Jan. Mass. its ﬁrmness. Boston.. Hawthorne was a skillful craftsman with an impressive sense of form. and its sureness of idiom. Some two years before his death he began to age very suddenly. he was a master of allegory and symbolism. Oct. poet. he suffered frequent nosebleeds. Back in Concord in 1860. Baltimore. Hawthorne was also the master of a literary style that is remarkable for its directness.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
(b. and he took to writing the ﬁgure “64” compulsively on scraps of paper.
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. critic. 1849. Md. 1809. 19. he had profound moral insight.

7
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and the atmosphere in his tales of horror is unrivaled in American ﬁction. on the death of Poe’s foster mother. and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. and of his childless wife. and Minor Poems (1829). where he was absent from all drills and classes for a week. He then returned to Baltimore. He successfully sought expulsion from the academy. an actor from Baltimore. Percy Bysshe Shelley.. He was later taken to Scotland and England (1815–20). In 1833 his MS. but his gambling losses at the university so incensed his guardian that he refused to let him continue. Before going. There he made a name as a critical reviewer and married his young cousin Virginia Clemm. a Richmond merchant (presumably his godfather). in 1811. Poverty forced him to join the army under the name of Edgar A. where he began to write stories. and Poe returned to Richmond to ﬁnd his sweetheart. some showing the inﬂuence of John Keats. and Other Poems. (Sarah) Elmira Royster.S. and by 1835 he was in Richmond as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. Tamerlane. Poe published a new volume at Baltimore. where in 1827 he published a pamphlet of youthful Byronic poems. he was taken into the home of John Allan. where he was given a classical education that was continued in Richmond. After his mother died in Richmond. John Allan purchased his release from the army and helped him get an appointment to the U. containing several masterpieces. He proceeded to New York City and brought out a volume of Poems. engaged. who was only
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. Virginia. but. Perry. Military Academy at West Point. Al Aaraaf. Poe was the son of the English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe. Jr. He went to Boston. His The Raven (1845) numbers among the best-known poems in the national literature. Tamerlane. Found in a Bottle won $50 from a Baltimore weekly. For 11 months in 1826 he attended the University of Virginia.

not Poe himself. in which he printed the ﬁrst detective story. there appeared. Poe then became editor of the Broadway Journal. 1845. Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine. There a contract for a monthly feature stimulated him to write William Wilson and The Fall of the House of Usher. In the New York Mirror of Jan. a short-lived weekly. but “Fanny’s” indiscreet writings about her literary love caused great scandal. During this last year the nowforgotten poet Frances Sargent Locke Osgood pursued Poe. thereafter a lifelong friend. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. The Murders in the Rue Morgue. In 1843 his The Gold-Bug won a prize of $100 from the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper. 29. Poe seems to have been an affectionate husband and son-in-law. in which he republished most of his short stories. The latter contains a study of a neurotic now known to have been an acquaintance of Poe.7
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13. which gave him national fame at once. his most famous poem. In 1844 he returned to New York. apparently for drinking. Later in 1839 Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque appeared (dated 1840). The Raven. and went to New York City. combining (as so often in his tales) much factual material with the wildest fancies. His The
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. In 1839 he became coeditor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in Philadelphia. He resigned from Burton’s about June 1840 but returned in 1841 to edit its successor. Willis. stories of supernatural horror. and became subeditor of the New York Mirror under N. Virginia did not object. which gave him great publicity. While in New York City in 1838 he published a long prose narrative. in 1845. P. It is considered one inspiration of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. wrote The Balloon-Hoax for the Sun. from advance sheets of the American Review. Poe was dismissed from his job in Richmond.

one grandfather had been a domestic servant. and spent a happy summer with only one or two relapses. These gossipy sketches on personalities of the day led to a libel suit. Portsmouth. Eng. In 1849 he went south. and in 1846 Poe moved to a cottage at Fordham (now part of New York City). by then the widowed Mrs. Susan Archer Talley. There he died. 1812. or other causes is still uncertain. had a wild spree in Philadelphia. 1870.—d. died in January 1847. who helped him ﬁnancially. which has been hailed as a masterpiece by some critics and as nonsense by others. but got safely to Richmond. His origins were middle class.7
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Raven and Other Poems and a selection of his Tales came out in 1845. a poet. to woo Sarah Helen Whitman. although whether from drinking. near Chatham. Gad’s Hill. The following year he went to Providence. if of a newfound and precarious respectability. Virginia. and
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. heart failure. He enjoyed the companionship of childhood friends and an unromantic friendship with a young poet. He composed poetic tributes to all of them. Poe’s wife. a transcendental “explanation” of the universe. 7. Shelton. Feb. In 1848 he also published the lecture Eureka.
CHARLES DICKENS
(b. Poe had some forebodings of death when he left Richmond for Baltimore late in September. Poe had close but platonic entanglements with Annie Richmond and with Sarah Anna Lewis. Rhode Island. Kent)
C
harles Dickens is generally considered the greatest British novelist of the Victorian period. June 9. Hampshire. where he ﬁnally became engaged to Elmira Royster. where he wrote The Literati of New York City for Godey’s Lady’s Book (May–October 1846). There was a brief engagement.

these attracted attention and were reprinted as Sketches by “Boz” (February 1836). then a shorthand reporter in the law courts (thus gaining a knowledge of the legal world often used in the novels). but his extravagance and ineptitude often brought the family to ﬁnancial embarrassment or disaster. interrupted and unimpressive. and his father went to prison for debt. Bentley’s Miscellany. was well paid. a clerk in the navy pay ofﬁce. Charles. and ﬁnally a parliamentary and newspaper reporter. Within a few months Pickwick. Dickens nearly became a professional actor in 1832. his ﬁrst novel. had been withdrawn from school and was now sent to do manual work in a factory. These shocks deeply affected Charles. His father. in which he serialized his second novel. touring strenuously and receiving quasi-royal honours as a literary
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. Finding serialization congenial and proﬁtable. He became a clerk in a solicitor’s ofﬁce.7 Charles Dickens
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the other an embezzler. In 1824 the family reached bottom. he undertook to edit a monthly magazine. ended at 15. then he experimented with shorter weekly installments for The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) and Barnaby Rudge (1841). he was invited to provide a comic serial narrative to accompany engravings by a well-known artist. Oliver Twist (1837–39). The same month. In 1833 he began contributing stories and descriptive essays to magazines and newspapers. Though abhorring this brief descent into the working class. seven weeks later the ﬁrst installment of Pickwick Papers appeared. was the rage and Dickens the most popular author of the day. he repeated the Pickwick pattern of 20 monthly parts in Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39). he then took a ﬁve-month vacation in America. His schooling. Much drawn to the theatre. he began to gain that sympathetic knowledge of their life and privations that informed his writings. Resigning from his newspaper job. Exhausted at last. the eldest son.

the humour less genial and abundant. and Great Expectations (1860–61)—and essays. Moreover. The satire is harsher. to which he contributed some serialized novels—including Hard Times (1854). and he cut a dandyish ﬁgure in London. and more certainly. His readings drew on more permanent elements in him and his art: his remarkable histrionic talents. (The actress Ellen Ternan. Little Dorrit (1855–57). the “happy endings” more subdued than in the early ﬁction. This turn was the result partly of political reasons. partly of marital troubles. A Tale of Two Cities (1859). his love of theatricals and of seeing and delighting an audience.” an American journalist said. the most popular were The
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. Dickens’s popularity was everexpanding. A performance usually consisted of two items. the immediate impulse being to ﬁnd some energetic distraction from his domestic unhappiness.) In April 1858 Dickens began a series of paid public readings. and the eminently performable nature of his ﬁction. it was easier to force himself to repeat a performance than create a book. he could earn more by reading than by writing.7
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celebrity but offending national sensibilities by protesting against the absence of copyright protection. Bleak House (1852–53). Novels continued to tumble forth: Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44). 27 years his junior. But in the novels of the 1850s Dickens is politically more despondent. All the Year Round (1859–88). emotionally more tragic. Of the 16 eventually performed. His initial repertoire consisted entirely of Christmas books but was soon ampliﬁed by episodes from the novels and magazine Christmas stories. He had about him “a sort of swell and overﬂow as of a prodigality of life. His journalistic ambitions at last found a permanent form in Household Words (1850–59) and its successor. Dombey and Son (1846–48). seems to have become his mistress in the 1860s.

The range. he collapsed. He died suddenly in June 1870 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. offers a critique of monetary and class values. His farewell reading tour was abandoned when. Tired and ailing though he was in his later years. until shortly before his death. Much in his work could appeal to simple and sophisticated. Sikes and Nancy. evil. he gave seasons of readings in London and embarked upon hardworking tours through the provinces and (in 1867–68) the United States.7 Charles Dickens
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Trial from Pickwick and A Christmas Carol (1834). Intermittently. and horriﬁcs were startlingly introduced in the last reading he devised. in April 1869. and humour. The most abundantly comic of English authors. Dickens remained inventive and adventurous in his ﬁnal novels. Our Mutual Friend (1864–65). and technological developments as well as the qualities of his work enabled his fame to spread worldwide very quickly. and psychological abnormality that had recurred throughout his novels. he was much more than a great entertainer. to the poor and to the Queen. The unﬁnished Edwin Drood (1870) would likely have been his most elaborate treatment of the themes of crime. though not his most ambitious. relying less than before on characterization. dialogue. with which he petriﬁed his audiences and half killed himself.
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. a large inclusive novel. Great Expectations. and intelligence of his apprehension of his society and its shortcomings enriched his novels and made him both one of the great forces in 19th-century literature and an inﬂuential spokesman of the conscience of his age. compassion. A Tale of Two Cities was an experiment. is his most ﬁnely achieved novel. Comedy predominated. Altogether he performed about 471 times. though pathos was important in the repertoire. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity than had any previous author during his lifetime.

In 1835 he published Paracelsus and in 1840 Sordello.” It was perhaps Mill’s critique that determined Browning never to confess his own emotions again in his poetry but to write objectively. and all his earlier works except Strafford. Eng. Encouraged by the actor Charles Macready. A Blot in the ’Scutcheon (produced in 1843). but Sordello. May 7. who condemned the poet’s exposure and exploitation of his own emotions and his “intense and morbid self-consciousness.—d. although formally a dramatic monologue. he was not successful in the theatre. Between 1841 and 1846. although his father gave him a grounding in Greek and Latin. Browning received only a slight formal education. Although Browning enjoyed writing for the stage. His ﬁrst published work. a form that he had already adopted for Strafford (1837). Although it received some favourable comment. 1889. anonymous). he published seven more plays in verse. Browning devoted his main energies for some years to verse drama. noted for his mastery of the dramatic monologue and of psychological portraiture. 12. was almost universally declared incomprehensible.7
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ROBERT BROWNING
(b. including Pippa Passes (1841). London. were printed at his family’s expense. both poems dealing with men of great ability striving to reconcile the demands of their own personalities with those of the world. since his strength lay in depicting. in a series of pamphlets under the general title of Bells and Pomegranates. Dec. 1812. as he had himself observed
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. embodied many of his own adolescent passions and anxieties. Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833. and Luria (1846). Paracelsus was well received. Venice [Italy])
R
obert Browning was perhaps the greatest English poet of the Victorian age. it was attacked by John Stuart Mill. These. which made exacting demands on its reader’s knowledge.

In that year he met Elizabeth Barrett. Men and Women (1855) was a collection of 51 poems—dramatic lyrics such as Memorabilia.” By 1845 the ﬁrst phase of Browning’s life was near its end. Barrett had. was a dominant and selﬁsh man. Robert. Her father. been for many years an invalid. conﬁned to her room and thought incurable. were forced to act. Disappointed for the ﬁrst time by the reception of his work. jealously fond of his daughter. Love Among the Ruins. and Bishop Blougram’s Apology. Browning’s cousin John Kenyon made them an allowance of £100 a year. When her doctors ordered her to Italy for her health and her father refused to allow her to go. although after the birth of their son. Browning produced comparatively little poetry during his married life. In her Poems (1844) Barrett had included lines praising Browning. who in turn had come to depend on his love. Their income was small. although they spent holidays in France and England. and many of the reviews were unfavourable and unhelpful. who wrote to thank her (January 1845). who had been corresponding and meeting regularly. however. a week later they left for Pisa. Throughout their married life. and a very few poems in which implicitly (By the Fireside) or explicitly (One Word More) he broke his rule and spoke of himself and of his love for his wife. and on his death in 1856 he left them £11. the great monologues such as Fra Lippo Lippi. In May they met and soon discovered their love for each other.7
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of Strafford. moreover. the lovers.000. mainly at Florence. in 1849 Mrs. How It Strikes a Contemporary. Browning in the following years wrote little. rather than Character in Action. They were married secretly in September 1846. where they had a ﬂat in Casa Guidi. and A Toccata of Galuppi’s. had no great sale. “Action in Character. however. their home was in Italy. Men and Women. sketching and modeling in clay by day and enjoying the society of
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and died on December 12. 1855. began to fail. were long narrative or dramatic poems.7 Robert Browning
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his friends at night. The most important works of his last years. Grand alike in plan and execution. in Italy. 1816.—d. it was clear that Browning had at last won a measure of popular recognition. Scotland. when he wrote with great ﬂuency. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. Thornton. While staying in Venice in 1889. At ﬁrst he avoided company. Eng. it was at once received with enthusiasm. she died in her husband’s arms. based on the proceedings in a murder trial in Rome in 1698. Browning caught a cold. Rabbi Ben Ezra. and Browning was established as one of the most important literary ﬁgures of the day. Dramatis Personae (1864)—including Abt Vogler. At last Mrs.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
(b. Another collected edition of his poems was called for in 1863. In 1868–69 he published his greatest work. The Ring and the Book. “The Medium”—reached two editions. In the autumn he returned slowly to London with his young son. Yorkshire)
C
harlotte Brontë was an English novelist best known for Jane Eyre (1847). His ﬁrst task on his return was to prepare his wife’s Last Poems for the press. When his next book of poems. after 1878. He spent his summers with friends in France. but Pauline was not included. a strong narrative of a woman in
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. Sludge. often dealing with contemporary themes. or Switzerland or. Haworth. and Mr. March 31. 1861. became seriously ill. which had been remarkably restored by her life in Italy. Browning’s health. On June 29. but gradually he accepted invitations more freely and began to move in society. Yorkshire. Caliban upon Setebos. April 21. For the rest of his life he was much in demand in London society.

Her father was Patrick Brontë (1777–1861). Their upbringing was aided by an aunt. together with their elder sisters before their deaths. In 1831 Charlotte was sent to Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head. with its inevitable restrictions. under the thin disguise of Lowood. was uncongenial to Charlotte. Patrick Branwell. Irish-born. he had changed his name from the more commonplace Brunty. In 1824 Charlotte and Emily. The work. She
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. where she stayed a year and made some lasting friendships. Ellen Nussey. The novel gave new truthfulness to Victorian ﬁction. near Kirkby Lonsdale.7
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conﬂict with her natural desires and social condition. who left her native Cornwall and took up residence with the family at Haworth. attended Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge. having been awarded a rectorship there. In 1832 she came home to teach her sisters but in 1835 returned to Roe Head as a teacher. the food unattractive. continued until her death. Charlotte condemned the school (perhaps exaggeratedly) long years afterward in Jane Eyre. writing and telling romantic tales for one another and inventing imaginative games played out at home or on the desolate moors. Mrs. and has provided much of the current knowledge of her life. and their six small children to Haworth amid the Yorkshire moors in 1820. Her correspondence with one of her friends. Emily. Lancashire. an Anglican clergyman. leaving the father to care for the remaining three girls—Charlotte. Maria Branwell Brontë. Soon after. he moved with his wife. Charlotte and Emily returned home in June 1825. Brontë and the two eldest children (Maria and Elizabeth) died. near Huddersﬁeld. The fees were low. Elizabeth Branwell. and for more than ﬁve years the Brontë children learned and played there. After serving in several parishes. and Anne—and a boy. and the discipline harsh.

begun in August 1846 in Manchester. She offered him an innocent but ardent devotion. Charlotte returned to Brussels as a pupil-teacher. Branwell’s talents for writing and painting. which their aunt had agreed to ﬁnance.
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. After a brief trip home. In 1839 Charlotte declined a proposal from the Rev. weak willed. nearly ﬁnished Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. but he was fundamentally unstable. The nature of Charlotte’s attachment to Héger and the degree to which she understood herself have been much discussed. Emily. Charlotte failed to place The Professor: A Tale but had. She stayed there during 1843 but was lonely and depressed. however. her friend’s brother. where she was staying with her father.7 Charlotte Brontë
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fell into ill health and melancholia and in the summer of 1838 terminated her engagement. and Anne were trying to place the three novels they had written. Rawdon. Meanwhile his sisters had planned to open a school together. and Madame Héger appears to have become jealous of her. The plan would eventually fail. Henry Nussey. and some months later one from another young clergyman. Her friends had left Brussels. At the same time Charlotte’s ambition to make the practical best of her talents and the need to pay Branwell’s debts urged her to spend some months as governess with the Whites at Upperwood House. but in February 1842 Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels as pupils to improve their qualiﬁcations in French and acquire some German. and his social charm had engendered high hopes for him. The talent displayed by both brought them to the notice of Constantin Héger. By 1846 Charlotte. his good classical scholarship. and intemperate. He went from job to job and took refuge in alcohol and opium. a ﬁne teacher and a man of unusual perception. but he tried to repress her emotions.

Elizabeth Gaskell. declining The Professor. Her father’s curate. Villette came out in January 1853. Meanwhile. she had declined a third offer of marriage. Arthur Bell Nicholls (1817–1906). 1847). in 1851. The months that followed were tragic ones. Elder and Company. but they were married on June 29. this time from James Taylor. feeling woman. was accompanied by exhausting sickness. a member of Smith. The Professor. She began another book.
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who had gone there for an eye operation. Branwell died in September 1848. however. which is based on her experiences in Brussels. she completed and submitted it at once. Emily in December. Emma. was published posthumously in 1857. When Smith. and Anne in May 1849. It took some months to win her father’s consent. and had an immediate success. Mrs. She stayed in 1851 with the writer Harriet Martineau and also visited her future biographer. declared themselves willing to consider a three-volume novel with more action and excitement in it. craving for love but able to renounce it at the call of impassioned self-respect and moral conviction. in Manchester and entertained her at Haworth. and she died in 1855. Her ﬁrst novel. published less than eight weeks later (on Oct. 1854. was her fourth suitor. Central to its success is the ﬁery conviction with which it presented a thinking. an Irishman. Charlotte completed Shirley: A Tale in the empty parsonage. Jane Eyre was accepted. 16. and it appeared in October. Her pregnancy. there she met the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray and sat for her portrait by George Richmond. of which some pages remain. far greater than that of the books that her sisters published the same year. Elder and Company. In the following years Charlotte went three times to London as the guest of her publisher.

a father. But he was no disciplinarian. U. A canoe trip that he and his brother John took along the Concord and Merrimack rivers in 1839 conﬁrmed in him the opinion that he ought to be not a schoolmaster but a poet of nature. 1862. With his magnetism Emerson attracted others to Concord.7
Henry David Thoreau
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HENRY DAVID THOREAU
(b. the Transcendentalists started a magazine. as evidenced in the essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849). and he resigned after two shaky weeks. Mass. dated July 1840. Thoreau entered Harvard University in 1833. 1817. for he came under the benign inﬂuence of the essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. carried
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. one with so much Emersonian self-reliance that he would still be his own man. May 6. Out of their heady speculations and afﬁrmatives came New England Transcendentalism. Concord.—d. and practical philosopher Henry David Thoreau is renowned for having lived the doctrines of Transcendentalism as recorded in his masterwork. poet. Concord)
he American essayist. Captained by Emerson. they were becoming friends. By the autumn of 1837. he searched for a teaching job and secured one at his old grammar school in Concord. Graduating in the middle ranks of the class of 1837. In Emerson’s company Thoreau’s hope of becoming a poet looked not only proper but feasible. who had settled in Concord during Thoreau’s sophomore year at Harvard. Sheer chance made his entrance to writing easier. W alden (1854). He wrote some poems—a good many. Emerson sensed in Thoreau a true disciple—that is. and a friend. The Dial. the inaugural issue. Thoreau saw in Emerson a guide. and for having been a vigorous advocate of civil liberties. in fact—for several years. July 12.S..

Midway in his Walden sojourn Thoreau had spent a night in jail. the music of wind in telegraph wires. reading. Several of the essays provide his original perspective on the meaning of work and leisure and describe his experiment in living as simply and self-sufﬁciently as possible. Out of such activity and thought came Walden. When not occupied with ﬁshing.7
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Thoreau’s poem Sympathy and his essay on the Roman poet Aulus Persius Flaccus. such as To the Maiden in the East. and another nature essay. the sounds. swimming. By early 1845 Thoreau felt more restless than ever. in July 1842. a series of 18 essays describing Thoreau’s experiment in basic living. or rowing. he spent long hours observing and recording the local ﬂora and fauna.” Then followed more lyrics. after building his home. a small lake south of Concord on land Emerson owned. Once settled. and writing. while Thoreau’s command of a clear. “A Winter Walk. he restricted his diet for the most part to the fruit and vegetables he found growing wild and the beans he planted. “Natural History of Massachusetts. straightforward but elegant style helped raise it to the level of a literary classic. having published a richer variety of Thoreau’s writing than any other magazine ever would.” The Dial ceased publication with the April 1844 issue. In the spring Thoreau picked a spot by Walden Pond. and look of woods and water at various seasons. smells. On an evening in July 1846 he encountered
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. until he decided to take up an idea of a Harvard classmate who had once built a waterside hut in which one could loaf or read. The physical act of living day by day at Walden Pond is what gives the book authority. the ﬁrst of his outdoor essays. The Dial published more of Thoreau’s poems and then. while in others Thoreau describes the various realities of life at Walden Pond: his intimacy with the small animals he came in contact with.

Thornton.—d. He declined. did an errand. he passed the peak of his career. the constable and tax gatherer. Yorkshire. Dec. A single night. He lectured and wrote against slavery. individual conscience against the expediency of the majority found expression in his most famous essay. 19. which Thoreau had omitted paying for several years. His defense of the private. Slowly his Transcendentalism drained away as he became a surveyor in order to support himself. “Civil Disobedience. paid the tax. July 30.7
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Sam Staples. he decided.” which was ﬁrst published in May 1849 under the title “Resistance to Civil Government. a dedicated abolitionist. he helped to speed ﬂeeing slaves north on the Underground Railroad. Maria. 1818. Haworth. was enough to make his point that he could not support a government that endorsed slavery and waged an imperialist war against Mexico. apparently of tuberculosis. As much as anyone in Concord. In the abolitionist John Brown he found a father ﬁgure beside whom Emerson paled. and then went huckleberrying. Staples asked him amiably to pay his poll tax. Thoreau suffered a psychic shock that probably hastened his own death. Wuthering Heights (1847). and Staples locked him up. By now Thoreau was in poor health.
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. But as Thoreau became less of a Transcendentalist he became more of an activist—above all. Thoreau reluctantly emerged. a highly imaginative novel of passion and hate set on the Yorkshire moors. The next morning a still-unidentiﬁed lady.” When Thoreau left Walden in 1847. Eng. Yorkshire
E
mily Brontë was an English novelist and poet who produced but one novel.
EMILY BRONTË
(b. 1848. perhaps his aunt. and when Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry failed and he was hanged in 1859.

The book of verse contained 21 of Emily’s poems. Yorkshire. and nearby Thornton that of Emily and her siblings Charlotte. Her passionate nature was more easily understood than Charlotte’s decorous temperament. near Halifax. was the birthplace of his elder daughters. Emily. The children were educated. and Anne. Maria and Elizabeth (who died young).7
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Her father held a number of curacies: Hartshead-cumClifton. A year later they published jointly a volume of verse. Although Emily pined for home and for the wild moorlands. In 1838 Emily spent six exhausting months as a teacher in Miss Patchett’s school at Law Hill. the children were left very much to themselves in the bleak moorland rectory. Poems by Currer. To keep the family together at home. when Charlotte secured a teaching position at Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head. and this led to the discovery that all three sisters—Charlotte. it seems that in Brussels she was better appreciated than Charlotte. and then resigned. when her aunt died. In 1820 the father became rector of Haworth. however. In October. during their early life. except for a single year that Charlotte and Emily spent at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. In February 1842 she and Emily went to Brussels to learn foreign languages and school management. Emily accompanied her as a pupil but suffered from homesickness and remained only three months. remaining there for the rest of his life. and a consensus of later criticism has accepted the fact that Emily’s verse alone reveals true
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. Emily returned permanently to Haworth. After the death of their mother in 1821. Patrick Branwell. and Anne—had written verse. Ellis and Acton Bell. Charlotte planned to keep a school for girls at Haworth. In 1845 Charlotte came across some poems by Emily. the initials of these pseudonyms being those of the sisters. at home. In 1835.

The venture cost the sisters about £50 in all. Soon after its publication. West Hills. journalist.Y. Emily was perhaps the greatest of the three Brontë sisters. but the record of her life is extremely meagre.
WALT WHITMAN
(b. calling it too savage. and its unusual structure. Whitman attended public school in Brooklyn. did not fare well. Cautley Newby of London. March 26. Long Island.)
alt Whitman was an American poet. N. critics were hostile. She had been ill for some time. and essayist whose verse collection Leaves of Grass is a landmark in the history of American literature. but publication of the three volumes was delayed until the appearance of their sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre.
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. for she was silent and reserved and left no correspondence of interest. and she suffered great pain. Only later did it come to be considered one of the ﬁnest novels in the English language. She died of tuberculosis in December 1848. which was immediately and hugely successful.. Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey had been accepted for joint publication by J.S. It is distinguished from other novels of the period by its dramatic and poetic presentation. when published in December 1847. began working at the age of 12. By midsummer of 1847.7 Emily Brontë
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poetic genius. U. Camden. Her single novel darkens rather than solves the mystery of her spiritual existence.—d. N. Emily’s health began to fail rapidly. May 31. 1819. and clumsy in construction.J. too animal-like. its abstention from all comment by the author. and learned the printing trade. 1892. and only two copies were sold. but now her breathing became difﬁcult. Wuthering Heights.

7
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Walt Whitman started out editing newspaper articles in New York City. His Leaves of Grass is considered one of the greatest works of American literature. but he took greater satisfaction in his later years writing poetry. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
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.

Unable to ﬁnd a publisher. At the age of 23 he edited a daily newspaper in New York. but the cover had a portrait of Whitman. Leaves of Grass was warmly praised by the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Discharged from the Eagle early in 1848 because of his support for the Free Soil faction of the Democratic Party. he went to New Orleans. taught in country schools on Long Island. where he worked for three months on the Crescent before returning to New York via the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes.
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. who wrote to Whitman on receiving the poems that it was “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom” America had yet contributed. During these years he had also read extensively at home and in the New York libraries. he sold a house and printed the ﬁrst edition of Leaves of Grass at his own expense. but they showed almost no literary promise. he built houses and dabbled in real estate in New York from about 1850 until 1855. and journalist he had published sentimental stories and poems in newspapers and popular magazines. and he had developed a strong love of music. After another abortive attempt at Free Soil journalism.. He had visited the theatre frequently. especially opera. La. a fairly important newspaper of the time. By the spring of 1855 Whitman had enough poems in his new style for a thin volume. and in 1846 he became editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. and became a journalist.7 Walt Whitman
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He was employed as a printer in Brooklyn and New York City. Whitman had spent a great deal of his 36 years walking and observing in New York City and Long Island. Though little appreciated upon its appearance. and he began experimenting with a new style of poetry. While a schoolteacher. printer. No publisher’s or author’s name appeared on the ﬁrst edition in 1855.

In January 1865 he became a clerk in the Department of the Interior. the journalist William O’Connor. Whitman took a temporary post in the paymaster’s ofﬁce in Washington. who wrote a vindication of Whitman. In 1860 a Boston publisher brought out the third edition of Leaves of Grass. contained much revision and rearrangement. the Sun-down Poem (later to become Crossing Brooklyn Ferry). The second edition was also a ﬁnancial failure. greatly enlarged and rearranged. In May 1865 a collection of war poems entitled Drum Taps showed Whitman’s readers a new kind of poetry. but the outbreak of the American Civil War bankrupted the ﬁrm. the Brooklyn Times. During the Civil War. contained his great elegy on President Abraham Lincoln. and in 1856 the second edition of Leaves of Grass appeared. Whitman then obtained a post in the attorney general’s ofﬁce. He spent his spare time visiting wounded and dying soldiers in the Washington hospitals. and once again Whitman edited a daily newspaper. but was unemployed by the summer of 1859. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. The fourth edition of Leaves of Grass. published in the autumn of 1865. moving from the oratorical excitement with which he had greeted the falling-in and arming of the young men at the beginning of the Civil War to a disturbing awareness of what war really meant. in May he was promoted but in June was dismissed because the secretary of the Interior thought that Leaves of Grass was indecent.7
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Whitman continued practicing his new style of writing in his private notebooks. In January 1873 his ﬁrst stroke left him partly
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. This collection contained revisions of the poems of the ﬁrst edition and a new one. published in 1867. and in the late 1860s Whitman’s work began to receive greater recognition. largely through the efforts of his friend. The Sequel to Drum Taps.

from New Bedford. Under the inﬂuence of the Romantic movement in literature and art. or “authorized. New York City)
he American novelist. For the expression of this persona he also created a form of free verse without rhyme or metre. 1. and potentialities of the North American continent. when critics were calling for a literature commensurate with the size. short-story writer. Whitman held the theory that the chief function of the poet was to express his own personality in his verse. when he served as cabin boy on a merchant ship. The Complete Poems and Prose was published in 1888. but abounding in oratorical rhythms and chanted lists of American place-names and objects. Sept. New York City—d. Additional editions of Leaves of Grass followed. and poet Herman Melville is best known for his novels of the sea. he eventually sailed on the whaler Acushnet. Melville had little formal schooling and began a period of wanderings at sea in 1839. and the book ﬁnally reached the form in which it was henceforth to be published. Aug. the year of Whitman’s death. Moby Dick (1851). untamed poetic spokesman of the proud young nation. 28. After a grinding search for work. on a voyage to the South Seas.
HERMAN MELVILLE
(b. Mass. along with the eighth edition of Leaves of Grass. including his masterpiece. 1819. Born to a wealthy New York family that suffered great ﬁnancial losses.. The ﬁrst edition of Leaves of Grass also appeared during the most nationalistic period in American literature. 1891.7
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paralyzed. The summer voyage did not dedicate Melville to the sea.” edition appeared in 1892. The ninth.
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. natural resources. From this time on throughout his life Whitman attempted to dress the part and act the role of the shaggy.

In August 1843 he signed as an ordinary seaman on the frigate United States.” a symbolic quest that ends in anguish and disaster. Whatever its precise correspondence with fact. Mass. Typee (1846). Typee was faithful to the imaginative impact of the experience on Melville. allegorical fantasy and medley of styles incomprehensible. In July Melville and a companion jumped ship and.7 The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time
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In June 1842 the Acushnet anchored in present-day French Polynesia. and then a year later Omoo had an identical response. He joined a mutiny that landed the mutineers in a Tahitian jail. Mardi (1849). Omoo (1847). spent about four months as guestcaptives of the reputedly cannibalistic Typee people. Lighthearted in tone. which in October 1844 discharged him in Boston. with the mutiny shown as something of a farce. and became a regular contributor of reviews and other pieces to a literary journal. In 1847 Melville began a third book. Melville quickly wrote Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850). Concealing his disappointment at the book’s reception. in August he was registered in the crew of the Australian whaler Lucy Ann. When Mardi appeared. In November he signed as a harpooner on his last whaler. Typee provoked immediate enthusiasm and outrage. in the Hawaiian Islands. Melville’s adventures here. It began as another Polynesian adventure but quickly set its hero in pursuit of the mysterious Yillah. Six months later he disembarked at Lahaina. according to Typee. “all beauty and innocence. however. The critics
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. On these events and their sequel. Although Melville was down for a 120th share of the whaler’s proceeds. became the subject of his ﬁrst novel. the Charles & Henry. somewhat romanticized. from which he escaped without difﬁculty. the voyage had been unproductive. out of Nantucket. public and critics alike found its wild. Actually. Melville based his second book. it describes Melville’s travels through the islands.

Saddleback Ahab pursues the white Educational Publishing. Basically its Book jacket for Moby Dick by story is simple. 2005.7
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acclaimed White-Jacket.S. ﬁnally Moby Dick. however much they seemed to revive the Melville of Typee. whale. almost mystically intense.
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. it was dependent. whose Scarlet Letter he had read in the spring of 1850 and who became Melville’s neighbour when Melville bought a farm near Hawthorne’s home. It brought its author neither acclaim nor reward. had passages of profoundly questioning melancholy. withdrawn Hawthorne. Their relationship reanimated Melville’s creative energies. Melville had promised his publishers for the autumn of 1850 the novel ﬁrst entitled The Whale. But both novels. The two men gradually drew apart. Moby Dick was published in London in October 1851 and a month later in America. and its powerful criticism of abuses in the U. Navy won it strong political support. such depth of feeling so persistently and openly declared was uncongenial. Captain Herman Melville. On his side. Moby Dick. Publishing. His delay in submitting it was caused by his explorations into the unsuspected vistas opened for him by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Saddleback Educational which ﬁnally kills him. To the cooler.

the sailor Billy Budd accidentally kills the satanic master-at-arms. The Conﬁdence-Man (1857). and having to face in 1853 the disaster of a ﬁre at his New York publishers that destroyed most of his books. it was another critical and ﬁnancial disaster. Provoked by a false charge. His return to prose culminated in his last work.7
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At that level. In a time of threatened mutiny he is hanged. Three American lecture tours were followed by his ﬁnal sea journey. it is an intense. Increasingly a recluse. He abandoned the trip in San Francisco. was the last of his novels to be published in his lifetime. The manuscript ends with the date April 19. when he joined his brother Thomas for a voyage around Cape Horn. Melville persevered with writing. yet his death evoked but a single obituary notice. which remained unpublished until 1924. 1891. Melville embarked almost at once on Pierre (1852). Melville dramatized his deeper concerns: the equivocal defeats and triumphs of the human spirit and its fusion of creative and murderous urges. His contributions to Putnam’s Monthly Magazine—“Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853). It was an intensely personal work. going willingly to his fate. in 1860. When published.
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. revealing the sombre mythology of his private life framed in terms of a story of an artist alienated from his society. He then abandoned the novel for poetry for a time. the novel Billy Budd. “The Encantadas” (1854). Near breakdown. superbly authentic narrative of whaling. By the end of the 1840s he was among the most celebrated of American writers. and “Benito Cereno” (1855)—reﬂected the despair and the contempt for human hypocrisy and materialism that possessed him increasingly. however. a despairing satire on an America corrupted by the shabby dreams of commerce. Five months later Melville died. In the perverted grandeur of Captain Ahab and in the beauties and terrors of the voyage of the Pequod.

At this moment of dejection. Charles Bray. Nov. she served for three years as subeditor of The Westminster Review. 1880. whose Social Statics (1851) had just been published. Lewes ceased in 1851 to regard her as his wife. Herbert Spencer. One of those men was George Henry Lewes. He had. Evans had a strong evangelical piety instilled in her as a girl. Eng. he introduced her to the two men who did. They consulted about articles and
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. he met Evans. his home hopelessly broken. the pseudonym of Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans. Warwickshire. condoned the adultery and was therefore precluded from suing for divorce. where she soon broke with her upbringing after she became acquainted with a prosperous ribbon manufacturer. a versatile Victorian journalist. after a brief return to Coventry.—d. and. In 1841 she moved with her father to Coventry. 22. including the subeditor of The Economist. which under her inﬂuence enjoyed its most brilliant run since the days of John Stuart Mill. Evans shared many of Spencer’s interests and saw so much of him that it was soon rumoured that they were engaged. Dec. Chilvers Coton. In 1851 Evans moved to London to become a freelance writer. a self-taught freethinker who campaigned for radical causes. In 1841 he had married Agnes Jervis. Though he did not become her husband. by whom he had four sons. London)
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eorge Eliot. however. 22. 1819. At evening parties in London she met many notable literary ﬁgures in an atmosphere of political and religious radicalism. But after two subsequent pregnancies by another man. was an English Victorian novelist who developed the method of psychological analysis characteristic of modern ﬁction.7
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but today George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) is noted more for her style and contributions to modern literature than her gender. Hulton Archive/ Getty Images 189
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went to plays and operas that Lewes reviewed for The Leader. Convinced that his break with Agnes was irrevocable, Evans determined to live openly with Lewes as his wife. In July 1854, after the publication of her translation of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, they went to Germany together. In all but the legal form it was a marriage, and it continued happily until Lewes’s death in 1878. At Weimar and Berlin Evans wrote some of her best essays for The Westminster and translated Spinoza’s Ethics (still unpublished), while Lewes worked on his groundbreaking life of Goethe. By his pen alone he had to support his three surviving sons at school in Switzerland as well as Agnes, whom he gave £100 a year, which was continued until her death in 1902. She turned to early memories and, encouraged by Lewes, wrote a story about a childhood episode in Chilvers Coton parish. Published in Blackwood’s Magazine (1857) as The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton, it was an instant success. Two more tales, Mr. Gilﬁl’s Love-Story and Janet’s Repentance, also based on local events, appeared serially in the same year, and Blackwood republished all three as Scenes of Clerical Life, 2 vol. (1858) under the pseudonym George Eliot. It would become her pen name for the rest of her professional career. Adam Bede, 3 vol. (1859), her ﬁrst long novel, she described as “a country story—full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay.” Its masterly realism brought to English ﬁction the same truthful observation of minute detail that Ruskin was commending in the Pre-Raphaelites. But what was new in this very popular novel was the combination of deep human sympathy and rigorous moral judgment. In The Mill on the Floss, 3 vol. (1860), Evans returned again to the scenes of her early life. The ﬁrst half of the book, with its remarkable portrayal of childhood, is irresistibly appealing, and throughout there are scenes that reach a new level of psychological subtlety.
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During their visit to Florence in 1860, Lewes suggested Savonarola as a good subject. Evans grasped it enthusiastically and began to plan Romola (1862–63). First, however, she wrote Silas Marner (1861). Its brevity and perfection of form made this story of the weaver whose lost gold is replaced by a strayed child the best known of her books. Romola was planned as a serial for Blackwood’s, until an offer of £10,000 from The Cornhill Magazine induced Evans to desert her old publisher. Rather than divide the book into the 16 installments the editor wanted, she accepted £3,000 less, an evidence of artistic integrity few writers would have shown. It was published in 14 parts between July 1862 and August 1863. Her next two novels are laid in England at the time of agitation for passage of the Reform Bill. In Felix Holt, the Radical, 3 vol. (1866), she drew the election riot from recollection of one she saw at Nuneaton in December 1832. Middlemarch (8 parts, 1871–72) is by general consent George Eliot’s masterpiece. Every class of Middlemarch society is depicted from the landed gentry and clergy to the manufacturers and professional men, the shopkeepers, publicans, farmers, and labourers. Several strands of plot are interwoven to reinforce each other by contrast and parallel. Yet the story depends not on close-knit intrigue but on showing the incalculably diffusive effect of the unhistoric acts of anonymous individuals. Daniel Deronda (8 parts, 1876) is built on the contrast between Mirah Cohen, a poor Jewish girl, and the upper class Gwendolen Harleth, who marries for money and regrets it. The hero, Daniel, after discovering that he is Jewish, marries Mirah and departs for Palestine to establish a home for his nation. The best part of Daniel Deronda is the keen analysis of Gwendolen’s character, which seems to many critics the peak of George Eliot’s achievement.
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In 1863 the Leweses bought the Priory, 21, North Bank, Regent’s Park, where their Sunday afternoons became a brilliant feature of Victorian life. There on Nov. 30, 1878, Lewes died. For nearly 25 years he had fostered Evans’s genius and managed all the practical details of life, which now fell upon her. Most of all she missed the encouragement that alone made it possible for her to write. For some years her investments had been in the hands of John Walter Cross, a banker introduced to the Leweses by Herbert Spencer. On May 6, 1880, they were married. Cross was 40; she was in her 61st year. After a wedding trip in Italy they returned to her country house at Witley before moving to 4, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where she died in December. She was buried at Highgate Cemetery.

harles Baudelaire was a French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on Les Fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil), which was perhaps the most important and inﬂuential poetry collection published in Europe in the 19th century. Regular acts of indiscipline led to his being expelled from the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand after a trivial incident in April 1839. After passing his baccalauréat examinations while enrolled at the Collège Saint-Louis, Baudelaire became a nominal student of law at the École de Droit while in reality leading a “free life” in the Latin Quarter. There he made his ﬁrst contacts in the literary world and also contracted the venereal disease that would eventually kill him, probably from a prostitute nicknamed Sarah la Louchette (“Squint-Eyed Sarah”), whom he celebrated in some of his most affecting early poems.

Baudelaire embarked on a protracted voyage to India in June 1841, but he effectively jumped ship in Mauritius and, after a few weeks there and in Réunion, returned to France in February 1842. He came into his inheritance in April 1842 and rapidly proceeded to dissipate it on the lifestyle of a dandiﬁed man of letters, spending freely on clothes, books, paintings, expensive food and wines, and, not least, hashish and opium. It was shortly after returning from the South Seas that Baudelaire met Jeanne Duval, who, ﬁrst as his mistress and then, after the mid-1850s, as his ﬁnancial charge, was to dominate his life for the next 20 years. Jeanne would inspire Baudelaire’s most anguished and sensual love poetry, her perfume and, above all, her magniﬁcent ﬂowing black hair provoking such masterpieces of the exotic-erotic imagination as La Chevelure (“The Head of Hair”). Baudelaire’s continuing extravagance exhausted half his fortune in two years, and he also fell prey to cheats and moneylenders, thus laying the foundation for an accumulation of debt that would cripple him for the rest of his life. In 1847 Baudelaire discovered the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Overwhelmed by what he saw as the almost preternatural similarities between the American writer’s thought and temperament and his own, he embarked upon the task of translation that was to provide him with his most regular occupation and income for the rest of his life. His translation of Poe’s Mesmeric Revelation appeared as early as July 1848, and thereafter translations appeared regularly in reviews before being collected in book form in Histoires extraordinaires (1856; “Extraordinary Tales”) and Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires (1857; “New Extraordinary Tales”), each preceded by an important critical introduction by Baudelaire. Baudelaire’s growing reputation as Poe’s translator and as an art critic at last enabled him to publish some of his
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poems. In June 1855 the Revue des deux mondes published a sequence of 18 of his poems under the general title of Les Fleurs du mal. The poems, which Baudelaire had chosen for their original style and startling themes, brought him notoriety. The following year Baudelaire signed a contract with the publisher Poulet-Malassis for a full-length poetry collection to appear with that title. When the ﬁrst edition of Les Fleurs du mal was published in June 1857, 13 of its 100 poems were immediately arraigned for offences to religion or public morality. After a one-day trial on Aug. 20, 1857, six of the poems were ordered to be removed from the book on the grounds of obscenity, with Baudelaire incurring a ﬁne of 300 (later reduced to 50) francs. The six poems were ﬁrst republished in Belgium in 1866 in the collection Les Épaves (“Wreckage”), and the ofﬁcial ban on them would not be revoked until 1949. Owing largely to these circumstances, Les Fleurs du mal became a byword for depravity, morbidity, and obscenity, and the legend of Baudelaire as the doomed dissident and pornographic poet was born. The failure of Les Fleurs du mal, from which he had expected so much, was a bitter blow to Baudelaire, and the remaining years of his life were darkened by a growing sense of despair. Although Baudelaire wrote some of his ﬁnest works in these years, few were published in book form. In 1859 Baudelaire produced in rapid succession a series of poetic masterpieces beginning with Le Voyage in January and culminating in what is widely regarded as his greatest single poem, Le Cygne (“The Swan”), in December. In February 1861 a second, and greatly enlarged and improved, edition of Les Fleurs du mal was published. In 1861 Baudelaire made an ill-advised and unsuccessful attempt to gain election to the French Academy. Abandoning verse poetry as his medium, he now concentrated on writing prose poems, a sequence of 20 of which
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was published in La Presse in 1862. In 1864 he was stricken with paralysis and aphasia from which he would never recover. Baudelaire died at age 46 in the Paris nursing home in which he had been conﬁned for the last year of his life. At the time of Baudelaire’s death, many of his writings were unpublished and those that had been published were out of print. This was soon to change, however. The future leaders of the Symbolist movement who attended his funeral were already describing themselves as his followers, and by the 20th century he was widely recognized as one of the greatest French poets of the 19th century.

yodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian novelist and short-story writer whose psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart, together with his unsurpassed moments of illumination, had an immense inﬂuence on 20th-century ﬁction. Unlike many other Russian writers of the ﬁrst part of the 19th century, Dostoyevsky was not born into the landed gentry. He often stressed the difference between his own background and that of Leo Tolstoy or Ivan Turgenev and the effect of that difference on his work. Dostoyevsky gave up a career as a military engineer (for which he was unsuited) in order to write. In 1849 he was arrested for belonging to Petrashevsky Circle, a radical discussion group; sentenced to be shot, he was reprieved at the last moment. The mock-execution ceremony was in fact part of the punishment. One of the prisoners went permanently insane on the spot; another went on to write Crime and Punishment. Dostoyevsky was sentenced to four years in a Siberian prison labour camp, to be followed by an indeﬁnite term as a soldier.
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The House of the Dead). Zapiski iz myortvogo doma (1861–62. his descriptions of epileptic seizures (especially in The Idiot) reveal the heights and depths of the human soul. Idiot (1869. Then there are the great novels. and the meaning of life. In Siberia Dostoyevsky experienced what he called the “regeneration” of his convictions.7
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After his return to Russia 10 years later. He also suffered his ﬁrst attacks of epilepsy. in the ﬁrst part of which an unnamed ﬁrstperson narrator delivers a brilliant attack on a set of beliefs shared by liberals and radicals. Later he published and wrote for several periodicals while producing his best novels. The Idiot) represents Dostoyevsky’s attempt to describe a perfectly good man in a way that is still psychologically convincing. they are famous for their psychological depth and insight and their near-prophetic treatment of issues in philosophy and politics. The Possessed) presents savage portraits of
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. Gone was the tinge of Romanticism and dreaminess present in his early ﬁction. Igrok (1866. suffering. he wrote a novel based on his prison camp experiences. gave the novel the immense power that readers still experience. the evil of criminals who could enjoy murdering children. Among his best known is the novella Zapiski iz podpolya (1864. No less than his accounts of being led to execution. These novels are concerned especially with faith. while Besy (1872. Crime and Punishment) describes a young intellectual who is willing to gamble on ideas and decides to solve all his problems at a stroke by murdering an old pawnbroker woman. Prestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866. The novel describes the horrors that Dostoyevsky actually witnessed: the brutality of the guards who enjoyed cruelty for its own sake. and the existence of decent souls amid ﬁlth and degradation—all these themes. Notes from the Underground). warranted by the author’s own experience. The Gambler) is based on his own gambling addiction.

it created complex thematic resonances among diverse kinds of material: short stories. and George Orwell’s 1984). Bratya Karamazovy (1879–80. plans for possible stories. psychological analyses of sensational crimes. and Jean-Paul Sartre. autobiographical essays. suffering. sketches that seem to lie on the boundary between ﬁction and journalism. he resumed the monthly Diary but lived to publish only a single issue (January 1881) before dying of a hemorrhage on January 28 in St. The Brothers Karamazov) focuses on the problem of evil. His ideas and formal innovations exercised a profound inﬂuence on Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1880 Dostoyevsky delivered an electrifying speech about the poet Aleksandr Pushkin. and political commentary. the Diary represented an attempt to initiate a new literary genre. Issue by monthly issue. and sole contributor. to name only a few. which he published in a separate issue of The Diary of a Writer (August 1880). A one-man journal. At least two modern literary genres. derive from Dostoyevsky’s writings. Albert Camus. and the craving for faith. After ﬁnishing Karamazov. he had been acclaimed one of his country’s greatest writers.7
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intellectuals but expresses great sympathy for workers and other ordinary people ill-served by the radicals who presume to speak in their name. In 1876–77 Dostoyevsky devoted his energies to Dnevnik pisatelya (“The Diary of a Writer”). Above all. By the end of his life.
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. literary criticism. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. and the meaning of life. the prison camp novel and the dystopian novel (works such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. the nature of freedom. André Gide. for which Dostoyevsky served as editor. his works continue to enthrall readers by combining suspenseful plots with ultimate questions about faith. Petersburg. The Diary proved immensely popular and ﬁnancially rewarding. publisher.

with the subtitle Moeurs de province (“Provincial Customs”). France—d. the ﬁrst product of his bold ambition to give French literature its Faust. For Madame Bovary he took a commonplace story of adultery and gave it an unrelenting objectivity—by which Flaubert meant the dispassionate recording of every trait or incident that could illuminate the psychology of his characters and their role in the logical development of
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. a realistic portrayal of bourgeois life. a short and pointed story with a heroine. Dec. on the Seine. As early as 1837 he had written “Passion et vertu”. 1856. 12. He was to spend nearly all the rest of his life there. The novel itself cost the author ﬁve years of hard work prior to its appearance. 15. and ﬁnally published the book as La Tentation de Saint Antoine in 1874. In 1841 Flaubert was enrolled as a student at the Faculty of Law in Paris. The composition of La Tentation de Saint Antoine provides an example of that tenacity in the pursuit of perfection that made Flaubert go back constantly to work on subjects without ever being satisﬁed with the results. Flaubert then retired to his estate at Croisset. At age 22. In 1839 he was writing Smarh. he was recognized to be suffering from a nervous disease that was taken to be epilepsy.7 Gustave Flaubert
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he novelist Gustave Flaubert is regarded as the prime mover of the realist school of French literature and best known for his masterpiece. with the result that henceforth he could devote all his time to literature. Madame Bovary was another work of long gestation. 1821. Mazza. near Rouen. resembling Emma Bovary. in 1856. May 8. and in 1870. Rouen. He resumed the task in 1846–49. however. This made him give up the study of law. 1880. in installments in the periodical Revue from October 1 to Dec. Madame Bovary (1857).

a book held to be his masterpiece that contains the three short stories “Un Coeur simple. At the age of 23 Ibsen got himself appointed director and playwright to a new theatre at Bergen. May 23. Guy de Maupassant. and. Flaubert immediately began work on Salammbô. and Trois Contes (1877). Kristiania [formerly Christiania. 1906. brought the author to trial on the ground of his novel’s alleged immorality.
HENRIK IBSEN
(b. To refresh himself after his long application to the dull world of the bourgeoisie in Madame Bovary.” “La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier. which appeared a few months before the outbreak of the Franco-German War of 1870 and was not appreciated by the public. Nor. Skien. several unsuccessful plays. March 20. The French government. and younger novelists—Émile Zola.—d. penetrating dialogue. however. especially. now Oslo])
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enrik Ibsen was a major Norwegian playwright of the late 19th century who introduced to the European stage a new order of moral analysis that was placed against a severely realistic middle-class background and developed with economy of action. Subsequent works include L’Éducation sentimentale (1869). in which
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his story—that transformed it into a work that represented the beginning of a new age in literature. Ivan Turgenev. a novel about ancient Carthage. and rigorous thought. Flaubert’s long novel Bouvard et Pécuchet was left unﬁnished when he died suddenly of an apoplectic stroke.” and “Hérodias.” In the 1870s Flaubert sought consolation from ﬁnancial troubles in his work and in the friendship of George Sand.

Peer Gynt is a capering will-o’-the-wisp. The theatre in Christiania soon went bankrupt.” his homeland had left a very bitter taste in his mouth. mainly in Rome. and Munich. and before long it would be recognized as such. acting traditions. Dresden. In Kongsemnerne (1863. Ibsen tried to make palatable dramatic fare out of three incongruous ingredients: the drawingroom drama of the French playwright Eugène Scribe that was then popular. and language of Denmark. returning to Norway only for short visits in 1874 and 1885. the actors. In April 1864 he left Norway for Italy. The Pretenders) he dramatized the mysterious inner authority that makes a man a man. however.7
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capacity he had to write a new play every year. In addition to writing plays which were uncongenial to him and unacceptable to audiences. Hard on the heels of Brand (1866) came Peer Gynt (1867). With him into exile Ibsen brought the fragments of a long semi-dramatic poem to be named Brand. Its central ﬁgure is a dynamic rural pastor who takes his religious calling with a blazing sincerity that transcends not only all forms of compromise but all traces of human sympathy and warmth as well. In Norway Brand was a tremendous popular success. even though (and in part because) its central meaning was so troubling. For reasons that he sometimes summarized as “small-mindedness. austere literature of unique magniﬁcence. or a great playwright. another drama in rhymed couplets presenting an utterly antithetical view of human nature. he did a lot of directing. a king. If Brand is a moral monolith. For the next 27 years he lived abroad. First at Bergen and then at the Norwegian Theatre in Christiania from 1857 to 1862. This one play was in fact the national drama after which Ibsen had been groping so long. and the medieval Icelandic sagas—Norway’s heroic. a buoyant and self-centred
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are vitalized by the presence of a demonically idealistic and totally destructive female. But Ibsen had not yet found his proper voice. Among his later plays are Fruen fra havet (1888. The Lady from the Sea). yielding. When he did. Ibsen won his battle with the world. A Doll’s House). When We Dead Awaken). Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder. But that was not Ibsen’s way. about a very ordinary family that disintegrates. yet who remains a lovable and beloved rascal. its effect was not to criticize or reform social life but to blow it up. Bygmester Solness (1892. but on another level. he paused now to work out his future. Another obsessive personage in these late plays is an aging artist who is bitterly aware of his failing powers.7
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opportunist who is aimless. Ibsen’s next play. The explosion came with Et dukkehjem (1879. and Naar vi døde vaagner (1899. The Master Builder). created even more dismay and distaste than its predecessor by showing worse consequences of covering up even more ugly truths. fearful dalliances
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. The play is a grim study of contamination spreading through a family under cover of the widowed Mrs. Ostensibly the play’s theme is congenital venereal disease. and wholly unprincipled. his play was about knowing oneself and being true to that self. Personal and confessional feelings infuse many of these last dramas. or perhaps from the series of fascinated. Lille Eyolf (1894. Alving’s timidly respectable views. Little Eyolf). it deals with the power of ingrained moral contamination to undermine the most determined idealism.” however shoddy or contrived. Audiences were scandalized at Ibsen’s refusal in A Doll’s House to scrape together (as any other contemporary playwright would have done) a “happy ending. With these two poetic dramas. Hedda Gabler (1890). perhaps these resulted from Ibsen’s decision in 1891 to return to Norway. Gengangere (1881. Ghosts). Two of these plays.

1910. 1828. and his insistence on his complete independence soon earned him the dislike of the radical intelligentsia. Aug. He served in the army. his refusal to join any intellectual camp. all published 1855–56). and “Sevastopol v avguste 1855 goda” (“Sevastopol in August”. Educated at home by tutors.7
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he had with young women in his later years. He was to remain throughout his life an “archaist. But his prickly vanity. Petersburg. His poor record soon forced him to transfer to the less demanding law faculty. Nov. Russian Empire—d. Tula province. He left the university in 1847 without a degree. Among his early published works are three sketches about the Siege of Sevastopol: “Sevastopol v dekabre mesyatse” (“Sevastopol in December”). “Sevastopol v maye” (“Sevastopol in May”). Tolstoy spent much of his life at his family estate of Yasnaya Polyana. He traveled in Europe before returning home and starting a school for peasant children. the Russian master of realistic ﬁction.” opposed to prevailing intellectual trends. Tolstoy was at ﬁrst hailed by the literary world of St. Tolstoy enrolled in the University of Kazan in 1844. where he began to pursue his interests in literature and ethics. He died in Kristiania in 1906.
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(b. The Cossacks) was among the works from a period
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. which included service in the Crimean War (1853–56). is one of the world’s greatest novelists. New Style]. Astapovo. 9. Ryazan province)
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eo Tolstoy. After his return to Norway. 28 [Sept. The scion of prominent aristocrats. His novel Kazaki (1863. Yasnaya Polyana. Ibsen continued to write plays until a stroke in 1900 and another a year later reduced him to a bedridden invalid. 20]. 7 [Nov.

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during which he experimented with new forms for expressing his moral and philosophical concerns. Voyna i mir (1865–69; W and Peace) marked the beginning of the ar period during which Tolstoy reached the height of his creative powers. It contains three kinds of material—a historical account of the Napoleonic wars, the biographies of ﬁctional characters, and a set of essays about the philosophy of history. It examines the lives of a large group of characters, centring on the partly autobiographical ﬁgure of the spiritually questing Pierre. Its structure, with its ﬂawless placement of complex characters in a turbulent historical setting, is regarded as one of the great technical achievements in the history of the Western novel. His other great novel, Anna Karenina (1875–77), takes family life as its concern. The novel’s ﬁrst sentence, which indicates its concern with the domestic, is perhaps Tolstoy’s most famous: “All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Both War and Peace and Anna Karenina advance the idea that ethics can never be a matter of timeless rules applied to particular situations. Rather, ethics depends on a sensitivity, developed over a lifetime, to particular people and speciﬁc situations. Tolstoy’s preference for particularities over abstractions is often described as the hallmark of his thought. After the publication of Anna Karenina Tolstoy underwent a spiritual crisis (described in Ispoved, 1884; My Confession). Drawn at ﬁrst to the Russian Orthodox church into which he had been born, he rapidly decided that it, and all other Christian churches, were corrupt institutions that had thoroughly falsiﬁed true Christianity. Having discovered what he believed to be Christ’s message and having overcome his paralyzing fear of death, Tolstoy devoted the rest of his life to developing and propagating

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his new faith, which stressed simplicity, nonviolence, and social reform. He was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox church in 1901. Among his later works is Smert Ivana Ilicha (written 1886; The Death of Ivan Ilyich), a novella describing a man’s gradual realization that he is dying and that his life has been wasted on trivialities; it is often considered the greatest novella in Russian literature. Tolstoy also wrote a treatise and several essays on art. In Chto takoye iskusstvo? (1898; What Is Art?), for instance, he argued that true art requires a sensitive appreciation of a particular experience, a highly speciﬁc feeling that is communicated to the reader not by propositions but by “infection.” Tolstoy lived humbly on his great estate, practicing a radical asceticism and in constant conﬂict with his wife. In November 1910, unable to bear his situation any longer, he left his estate incognito, although the international press was soon able to report on his movements. During his ﬂight he contracted pneumonia, and died of heart failure at the railroad station of Astapovo.

he American lyric poet Emily Dickinson, who lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision, is widely considered to be one of the leading 19th-century American poets.

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The second of three children, Dickinson grew up in moderate privilege and with strong local and religious attachments. For her ﬁrst nine years she resided in a mansion built by her paternal grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, who
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had helped found Amherst College but then went bankrupt shortly before her birth. Her parents were loving but austere, and she became closely attached to her brother, Austin, and sister, Lavinia. Never marrying, the two sisters remained at home, and when their brother married, he and his wife established their own household next door. Dickinson attended the coeducational Amherst Academy, where she was recognized by teachers and students alike for her prodigious abilities in composition. She also excelled in other subjects emphasized by the school, most notably Latin and the sciences. When she left home to attend Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in nearby South Hadley, she found the school’s institutional tone uncongenial. Mount Holyoke’s strict rules and invasive religious practices, along with her own homesickness and growing rebelliousness, help explain why she did not return for a second year. At home as well as at school and church, the religious faith that ruled the poet’s early years was evangelical Calvinism, a faith centred on the belief that humans are born totally depraved and can be saved only if they undergo a life-altering conversion in which they accept the vicarious sacriﬁce of Jesus Christ. Questioning this tradition soon after leaving Mount Holyoke, Dickinson was to be the only member of her family who did not experience conversion or join Amherst’s First Congregational Church. Yet she seems to have retained a belief in the soul’s immortality or at least to have transmuted it into a Romantic quest for the transcendent and absolute. One reason her mature religious views elude speciﬁcation is that she took no interest in creedal or doctrinal deﬁnition. In this she was inﬂuenced by both the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the mid-century tendencies of liberal Protestant orthodoxy.
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Development as a Poet
Although Dickinson had begun composing verse by her late teens, few of her early poems are extant. Until she was in her mid-20s, her writing mostly took the form of letters, and a surprising number of those that she wrote from age 11 onward have been preserved. Sent to her brother, Austin, or to friends of her own sex, especially Abiah Root, Jane Humphrey, and Susan Gilbert (who would marry Austin), these generous communications overﬂow with humour, anecdote, invention, and sombre reﬂection. In general, Dickinson seems to have given and demanded more from her correspondents than she received. On occasion she interpreted her correspondents’ laxity in replying as evidence of neglect or even betrayal. Indeed, the loss of friends, whether through death or cooling interest, became a basic pattern for Dickinson. Much of her writing, both poetic and epistolary, seems premised on a feeling of abandonment and a matching effort to deny, overcome, or reﬂect on a sense of solitude. Dickinson’s closest friendships usually had a literary ﬂavour. She was introduced to the poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson by one of her father’s law students, Benjamin F. Newton, and to that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Susan Gilbert and Henry Vaughan Emmons, a gifted college student. Two of Barrett Browning’s works, A Vision of Poets, describing the pantheon of poets, and Aurora Leigh, on the development of a female poet, seem to have played a formative role for Dickinson, validating the idea of female greatness and stimulating her ambition. In 1855 Dickinson traveled to Washington, D.C., with her sister and father, who was then ending his term as U.S. representative. On the return trip the sisters made an extended stay in Philadelphia, where it is thought the poet

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heard the preaching of Charles Wadsworth, a fascinating Presbyterian minister whose pulpit oratory suggested (as a colleague put it) “years of conﬂict and agony.” Seventy years later, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet’s niece, claimed that Emily had fallen in love with Wadsworth, who was married, and then grandly renounced him. The story is too highly coloured for its details to be credited; certainly, there is no evidence the minister returned the poet’s love. Yet it is true that a correspondence arose between the two and that Wadsworth visited her in Amherst about 1860, and again in 1880. Always fastidious, Dickinson began to restrict her social activity in her early 20s, staying home from communal functions and cultivating intense epistolary relationships with a reduced number of correspondents. In 1855, leaving the large and much-loved house in which she had lived for 15 years, the 25-year-old woman and her family moved back to the dwelling associated with her ﬁrst decade: the Dickinson mansion on Main Street in Amherst. She found the return profoundly disturbing, and when her mother became incapacitated by a mysterious illness that lasted from 1855 to 1859, both daughters were compelled to give more of themselves to domestic pursuits.

Mature Career
In summer 1858, Dickinson began assembling her manuscript-books. She made clean copies of her poems on ﬁne quality stationery and then sewed small bundles of these sheets together at the fold. Over the next seven years she created 40 such booklets and several unsewn sheaves, and altogether they contained about 800 poems. Dickinson sent more poems to her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, a cultivated reader, than to any other

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known correspondent. Repeatedly professing eternal allegiance, these poems often imply that there was a certain distance between the two—that the sister-in-law was felt to be haughty, remote, or even incomprehensible. Yet Susan admired the poetry’s wit and verve and offered the kind of personally attentive audience Dickinson craved. Susan was an active hostess, and her home was the venue at which Dickinson met a few friends, most importantly Samuel Bowles, publisher and editor of the inﬂuential Springﬁeld Republican. Gregarious, captivating, and unusually liberal on the question of women’s careers, Bowles had a high regard for Dickinson’s poems, publishing (without her consent) seven of them during her lifetime—more than appeared in any other outlet. In those years Dickinson experienced a painful and obscure personal crisis, partly of a romantic nature. The abject and pleading drafts of her second and third letters to the unidentiﬁed person she called “Master” are probably related to her many poems about a loved but distant person, usually male. Whoever the person was, Master’s failure to return Dickinson’s affection—together with Susan’s absorption in her ﬁrst childbirth and Bowles’s growing invalidism—contributed to a piercing and ultimate sense of distress. Instead of succumbing to anguish, however, she came to view it as the sign of a special vocation, and it became the basis of an unprecedented creativity. In April 1862, about the time Wadsworth left the East Coast for a pastorate in San Francisco, Dickinson sought the critical advice of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose witty article of advice to writers, A Letter to a Young Contributor, had just appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. Higginson was known as a writer of delicate nature essays and a crusader for women’s rights. Enclosing four poems, Dickinson asked for his opinion of her verse—whether or

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and serenity. she asked.” as she called him. poet and author of the novel Ramona (1884).7 Emily Dickinson
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not it was “alive. he recorded his vivid ﬁrst impression of her “plain” features. In 1869 Higginson invited the poet to Boston to attend a literary salon.” The ensuing correspondence lasted for years. “Dont
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. She repaired an 11-year breach with Samuel Bowles and made friends with Maria Whitney. many more samples of her work.” In her last 15 years Dickinson averaged 35 poems a year and conducted her social life mainly through her chiselled and often sibylline written messages. when she shared her cousins Louisa and Frances Norcross’s boardinghouse in Cambridge and underwent a course of treatment with the leading Boston ophthalmologist. self-possession. with the poet sending her “preceptor. He was “glad not to live near her. and loquacious and exhausting brilliance. alternately teasing and conﬁding. Her father’s sudden death in 1874 caused a profound and persisting emotional upheaval yet eventually led to a greater openness. and from about age 50 she conducted a passionate romance with Otis Phillips Lord. and Helen Hunt Jackson. In declining an erotic advance or his proposal of marriage. an elderly judge on the supreme court of Massachusetts. When Higginson visited her the next year. The letters she apparently sent Lord reveal her at her most playful. a teacher of modern languages at Smith College. she was reaching out at a time of accentuated loneliness. Dickinson’s last trips from Amherst were in 1864 and 1865. “exquisitely” neat attire. “childlike” manner. In addition to seeking an informed critique from a professional but not unsympathetic man of letters. she refused the offer. She described her symptoms as an aching in her eyes and a painful sensitivity to light. Dickinson resumed contact with Wadsworth.

photographer. 1898. Surrey)
L
ewis Carroll. was a English logician. 14. Through the Looking-Glass (1871). enigmatic brilliance. Eng. mathematician. with lines of three or four stresses. Jan. Her verse is distinguished by its epigrammatic compression. Only 10 of Emily Dickinson’s nearly 1.
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. The poet died in 1886. and in the intellectual content of her work she likewise proved exceptionally bold and original.
LEWIS CARROLL
(b. The deaths of Dickinson’s friends in her last years left her feeling terminally alone. and novelist who is especially remembered for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel. Cheshire. she ceased seeing almost everyone. 27. Daresbury. The immediate cause of death was a stroke. 1832. haunting personal voice. when she was 55 years old. apparently including her sister-inlaw.7
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you know you are happiest while I withhold and not confer—dont you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?” After Dickinson’s aging mother was incapacitated by a stroke and a broken hip. the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Jan. caring for her at home made large demands on the poet’s time and patience. She habitually worked in verse forms suggestive of hymns and ballads. Her health broken by this culminating tragedy. Her unusual off-rhymes have been seen as both experimental and inﬂuenced by the 18th-century hymnist Isaac Watts. Guildford. and lack of high polish. She freely ignored the usual rules of versiﬁcation and even of grammar. But the single most shattering death. occurring in 1883.—d.800 poems are known to have been published in her lifetime. was that of her eight-year-old nephew next door.

But he felt himself unsuited for parish work and decided that he was perfectly content to remain a bachelor. since only heads of houses were free both to marry and to continue in residence. by the terms of this particular endowment. Alice Liddell and her sisters Lorina and Edith were not the ﬁrst of Dodgson’s child friends. picnicked on the
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. It is therefore not surprising that he should begin to entertain the children of Henry George Liddell. rowed the three children up the Thames from Oxford to Godstow. the studentship was dependent upon his remaining unmarried. and. Dodgson and his friend Robinson Duckworth. which he entered as an undergraduate in 1851. Had he gone on to become a priest he could have married and would then have been appointed to a parish by the college. 22. the sons of the poet Alfred. He was made a “senior student” (called a fellow in other colleges) and appointed lecturer in mathematics in 1855. As was the case with all fellowships at that time. 1861. 1862. Lord Tennyson. On July 4. proceeding to holy orders. he proceeded to a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1854. Dodgson was ordained a deacon in the Church of England on Dec. Oxford. They had been preceded or were overlapped by the children of the writer George Macdonald.7
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Dodgson excelled in his mathematical and classical studies at the Christ Church. and various other chance acquaintances. fellow of Trinity. a post he resigned in 1881. Dodgson’s association with children grew naturally enough out of his position as an eldest son with eight younger brothers and sisters. dean of Christ Church. But the Liddell children undoubtedly held an especially high place in his affections—partly because they were the only children in Christ Church. He also suffered from a bad stammer (which he never wholly overcame) and found that he was able to speak naturally and easily to children.

He illustrated it with his own crude but distinctive drawings and gave the ﬁnished product to Alice Liddell.” wrote Dodgson in his diary. and his son Greville. At Duckworth’s suggestion he got an introduction to John Tenniel. “Oh. and returned to Christ Church late in the evening: “On which occasion.000 volumes of it. declared that he “wished there were 60. when they parted at the door of the deanery. Mr. while visiting the deanery. The result was Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (dated 1872.7
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bank. and Alice went so far as to cry. By the time of Dodgson’s death. whom he commissioned to make illustrations to his speciﬁcation. which I undertook to write out for Alice. Liddell to persuade the author to publish it. The book was published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865.” Accordingly. this inspired Dodgson to tell so much better a story than usual that both Duckworth and Alice noticed the difference. Alice
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. But the novelist Henry Kingsley. honestly surprised. and urged Mrs. I wish you would write out Alice’s adventures for me!” Dodgson was able to write down the story more or less as told and added to it several extra adventures that had been told on other occasions. Macdonald took it home to be read to his children. the Punch magazine cartoonist.” Much of the story was based on a picnic a couple of weeks earlier when they had all been caught in the rain.The book was a slow but steadily increasing success. with no thought of hearing of it again. for some reason. Dodgson. Dodgson revised it for publication. read it. Dodgson. and by the following year Dodgson was already considering a sequel to it. aged six. author of some of the best children’s stories of the period. actually published December 1871). consulted his friend George Macdonald. “I told them the fairy-tale of Alice’s Adventures Underground. chanced to pick it up from the drawing-room table.

translating them into Latin as Carolus Ludovicus. especially The Innocents Abroad (1869). Before he had told the original tale of Alice’s Adventures. a narrative nonsense poem that is rivalled only by the best of Edward Lear.7 Lewis Carroll
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(taking the two volumes as a single artistic triumph) had become the most popular children’s book in England: by the time of his centenary in 1932 it was one of the most popular and perhaps the most famous in the world.
MARK TWAIN
(b. lecturer. Dodgson arrived at this pen name by taking his own names Charles Lutwidge. but in March 1856 a poem called Solitude was published under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. The earliest of these appeared anonymously.S. and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives. 30. Conn. U. April 21. He used the name afterward for all his nonacademic works. then reversing and retranslating them into English. journalist. 1898).—d.. and irascible moralist. His humorous and other verses were collected in 1869 as Phantasmagoria and Other Poems and later separated (with additions) as Rhyme? and Reason? (1883) and Three Sunsets and Other Poems (published posthumously. 1910. Redding. The 1883 volume also contained The Hunting of the Snark. distinctive humorist.
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. Dodgson had published a number of humorous items in verse and prose and a few inferior serious poems.)
M
ark Twain (the pseudonym of Samuel Clemens) was an American humorist. especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). he transcended the apparent limitations of his origins to become a popular public ﬁgure and one of America’s best and most beloved writers. Mo. 1835. Florida. A gifted raconteur. and for his adventure stories of boyhood. Nov. and Life on the Mississippi (1883). Roughing It (1872).

who owned a newspaper. Having acquired a trade by age 17. It was not until he was 37. indulge in boyish amusements. Louis in 1853 before working in New York City. that he woke up to discover he had become a “literary person. to the Mississippi River port town of Hannibal. John Clemens opened a store and eventually became a justice of the peace.7 The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time
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Youth and Apprenticeships
Samuel Clemens. which entitled him to be called “Judge” but not to a great deal more.
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. was born two months prematurely and was in relatively poor health for the ﬁrst 10 years of his life. He continued to write. Clemens left Hannibal in 1853 with some degree of self-sufﬁciency. Some of those early sketches. Ament’s Missouri Courier. He worked brieﬂy as a typesetter in St. though without ﬁrm literary ambitions. from time to time. He lived sparingly in the Ament household but was allowed to continue his schooling and. his boyhood had effectively come to an end. where there were greater opportunities. appeared in Eastern newspapers and periodicals. It was the diminishing fortunes of the Clemens family that led them in 1839 to move 30 miles (50 km) east from Florida. and Washington. but he also occasionally contributed sketches and articles. He became more than competent as a typesetter while working for his brother. Philadelphia. In 1848 Clemens became a printer’s apprentice for Joseph P.” In the meantime. he once remarked. trying many occupations. Mo.. the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Mofﬁt Clemens. Nevertheless. such as The Dandy Frightening the Squatter (1852). For almost two decades he would be an itinerant labourer. D. he was intent on seeing the world and exploring his own possibilities. by the time Clemens was 13.C.

He submitted several letters to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.. After a sojourn in Hannibal. in the hearty company of a group of writers sometimes called the Sagebrush Bohemians. which he did in 1859. Clemens brought his years on the river to a halt in 1861. He again embarked on an apprenticeship. and these attracted the attention of the editor. In February 1863 Clemens covered the legislative session in Carson City and wrote three letters for the
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. River Intelligence (1859).7 Mark Twain
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Still restless and ambitious. La. lampooned the self-important senior pilot Isaiah Sellers. who offered him a salaried job as a reporter. he saw a more immediate opportunity and persuaded the accomplished riverboat captain Horace Bixby to take him on as an apprentice.” as he once described his fellow riverboat pilots in a letter to his wife. whose observations of the Mississippi were published in a New Orleans newspaper. he booked passage in 1857 on a steamboat bound for New Orleans. the most congenial one he had ever followed. Clemens studied the Mississippi River and the operation of a riverboat under the masterful instruction of Bixby. Mark Twain. and again he succeeded. where Sam had to shift for himself. had no particular use for this nonunion man. but Clemens did envy what he later recalled to be Sellers’s delicious pen name. planning to ﬁnd his fortune in South America. and. The Civil War severely curtailed river trafﬁc. in one satirical sketch. with an eye toward obtaining a pilot’s license. Joseph Goodman. Instead. Clemens and the other “starchy boys. fearing that he might be pressed into service as a Union gunboat pilot. He continued to write occasional pieces throughout these years and. The profession of riverboat pilot was. Clemens accompanied his brother Orion to the Nevada Territory. as he confessed many years later in Old Times on the Mississippi.

but he apparently wanted to become something more than a journalist. Clemens decided to write up the story. and he took notes for a literary representation of the tale. It would be several years before this pen name would acquire the ﬁrmness of a full-ﬂedged literary persona. The story was widely known. He signed them “Mark Twain. When the humorist Artemus Ward invited him to contribute something for a book of humorous sketches.
Literary Maturity
The next few years were important for Clemens. traveling to Hawaii for the Sacramento Union and also writing for New York newspapers. It was a success. “Mark Twain” had acquired sudden celebrity. speaking mostly on the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) in 1866. and for the rest of his life. he was discovering by degrees what it meant to be a “literary person. and he became the Nevada correspondent for the San Francisco Morning Call.” Apparently the mistranscription of a telegram misled Clemens to believe that the pilot Isaiah Sellers had died and that his cognomen was up for grabs. but it was published in the New York Saturday Press in November 1865 and was subsequently reprinted throughout the country. In the meantime. he knew he could
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. A period as a reporter in San Francisco followed. and Sam Clemens was following in his wake. however. It was there that he heard the story of a jumping frog.7
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Enterprise. Clemens seized it. Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog arrived too late to be included in the volume. He continued to write for newspapers. but it was new to Clemens.” Some of his articles and sketches had appeared in New York papers. It appears that he was committed to making a professional career for himself. He went on his ﬁrst lecture tour. though he found touring grueling. He then went to the Tuolumne foothills to do some mining.

It was a great success. but it did not sell well.C.7
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Mark Twain. Library of Congress. and the announcement of a transatlantic excursion to Europe and the Holy Land provided him with just such an opportunity. Washington. He had ambitions to enlarge his reputation and his audience. His ﬁrst book was The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867). Eventually his account of the voyage was published as The Innocents Abroad (1869). The Alta paid the substantial fare in exchange for some 50 letters he would write concerning the trip. LC-USZ62-112728
take to the lecture platform when he needed money. serving as the traveling correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California and for New York newspapers. D.
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. That same year. he moved to New York City.

and Clemens decided that the untutored boy had his own story to tell. was published in February 1872 and sold well.7
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The trip abroad was fortuitous in another way. was coloured by a nostalgia for childhood and simplicity that would permit Twain to characterize the novel as a “hymn” to childhood. Clemens’s courtship of Olivia Langdon. but a bit ruefully too.” Huck had appeared as a character in Tom Sawyer. During that interval. which recounts the mischievous adventures of a boy growing up along the Mississippi River. Twain’s ﬁrst attempt at a novel. Huckleberry Finn was written in ﬁts and starts over an extended period and would not be published until 1885. N. A book about his experiences in the West. while staying with his in-laws Susan and Theodore Crane on Quarry Farm overlooking Elmira. The Gilded Age (1873).Y. He soon discovered that it had to be told in Huck’s own vernacular voice. a way of life that would never return. The latter became Old Times. the daughter of a prosperous businessman from Elmira. Twain often turned his attention to other projects. It described comically. was remarkably well received and encouraged him to begin writing Tom Sawyer. They were married in February 1870. who invited Clemens to dine with his family in New York and introduced him to his sister Olivia. The highly episodic narrative of Tom Sawyer (1876). Roughing It. In the summer of 1876. Clemens began writing what he called in a letter to his friend William Dean Howells “Huck Finn’s Autobiography. along with his reminiscences about his days as a riverboat pilot. was an ardent one.. conducted mostly through correspondence. He met on the boat a young man named Charlie Langdon. only to return again and again to the novel’s manuscript. the writer fell in love with her. What
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. which in turn would later become a portion of Life on the Mississippi.

his wife in 1904. announced the failure of his publishing house. The description may or may not be apt. Yet this was
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. To the Man Sitting in Darkness (1901). In 1894. however. and an essay on lynching.7 Mark Twain
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distinguishes Huckleberry Finn from the other Huck-andTom sequels that Twain wrote is the moral dilemma Huck faces in aiding the runaway slave Jim while at the same time escaping from the unwanted inﬂuences of so-called civilization. cruelty. and another daughter in 1909. and violence. the novel’s narrator.” But he had always been against sham and corruption. he continued to make often ill-advised investments. Clemens’s travels at home and abroad resulted in several books published during the 1880s. approaching his 60th year. Twain was able to address the shameful legacy of chattel slavery prior to the Civil War and the persistent racial discrimination and violence after. He embarked on a lecture tour in 1884. a denunciation of imperialism. All the while. and declared personal bankruptcy. It is true that in his polemical essays and in much of his ﬁction during this time he was venting powerful moral feelings and commenting freely on the “damn’d human race. Some of Twain’s best work during his late years was not ﬁction but polemical essays in which his earnestness was not in doubt: an essay against anti-Semitism. including his copyrights. The United States of Lyncherdom (posthumously published in 1923).
Old Age
Clemens’s last years have been described as his “bad mood” period. greed. Through Huck. Concerning the Jews (1899). His eldest daughter died in 1896. Samuel Clemens was forced to repair his fortunes and remake his career. Clemens eventually assigned his property. to his wife.

which had appeared earlier in the century. in the fall of 1868. combined with shrewd investments of his money.7
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also a period during which he received palpable tokens of public approbation in the form of three honorary degrees— from Yale University in 1901. Zola worked at a Paris publishing house and as a journalist during the 1860s while establishing himself as a ﬁction writer. each featuring a different member of the same family. a grisly tale of murder and its aftermath. where he died. La Fortune des Rougon (The Rougon Family Fortune). from Oxford University in 1907. was gradually expanded to comprise the 20 volumes of the RougonMacquart series. the ﬁrst novel in the series. a French critic and political activist. and Madeleine Férat (1868). was also the most prominent French novelist of the late 19th century. a rather unsuccessful attempt at applying the principles of heredity to the novel. which described that tour. began to appear in serial form in 1870. 28. Two early novels are Thérèse Raquin (1867). France—d. the one he most coveted. More important. Paris. was interrupted by the outbreak of the
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. It was this interest in science that led Zola. from the University of Missouri in 1902. and he returned to his home in Connecticut. allowed Clemens to pay his creditors in full. and.
ÉMILE ZOLA
(b. He traveled to Bermuda in January 1910. originally involving 10 novels. Zola’s project. Paris)
É
mile Zola. Sept. a world lecture tour and the publication of Following the Equator (1897). April 2. Raised in straitened circumstances. By early April he was having severe chest pains. 1902. to conceive the idea of a large-scale series of novels similar to Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). 1840.

1898. or the belief that character. As the founder and most celebrated member of the naturalist movement. The Naturalist Novelists). environment. Zola went on to produce these 20 novels—most of which are of substantial length— at the rate of nearly one per year. The Experimental Novel) and Les Romanciers naturalistes (1881. involves the application to literature of two scientiﬁc principles: determinism. He returned to France the following June when he learned that the Dreyfus case was to be reopened with a possible
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. as Zola explained. He charged various high-ranking military ofﬁcers and. temperament. Zola published a ﬁerce denunciation of the French general staff in an open letter beginning with the words “J’accuse” (“I accuse”). when his appeal appeared certain to fail. completing the series in 1893. and was eventually published in book form in October 1871. ultimately. that Alfred Dreyfus was innocent. including Le Roman expérimental (1880. indeed. Naturalism. which entails the objective recording of precise data in controlled conditions. institutions. 13. in the newspaper L’Aurore. In 1898 Zola intervened in the Dreyfus Affair—that of a Jewish French army ofﬁcer whose wrongful conviction for treason in 1894 sparked a 12-year controversy that deeply divided French society. the War Ofﬁce itself of concealing the truth in the wrongful conviction of Dreyfus for espionage. rightly. and historical moment. and ideas that marked the rise of modern industrialism and the cultural changes it entailed. On Jan. Zola was prosecuted for libel and found guilty. In July 1899.7 Émile Zola
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Franco-German War in July. At an early stage in the proceedings Zola had decided. and the experimental method. Zola also published several treatises to explain his theories on art. and. he ﬂed to England. behaviour are determined by the forces of heredity. The series thus constitutes a family saga while providing a valuable sociological document of the events.

HENRY JAMES
(b. Zola died unexpectedly in September 1902. They were taken abroad as infants. Feb. Eng. a prominent social theorist and lecturer. during his 40-year career. Honoré de Balzac. in addition to numerous pieces of journalism. April 15. a great ﬁgure in the transatlantic culture. the James children acquired languages and an awareness of Europe few Americans had in their times. Zola’s intervention in the controversy helped to undermine anti-Semitism and rabid militarism in France. the victim of coal gas asphyxiation resulting from a blocked chimney ﬂue. He had produced some 60 volumes of ﬁction. and criticism. His fundamental theme was the innocence and exuberance of the New World in clash with the corruption and wisdom of the Old. London.. but he devoted his study time to reading Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. His ﬁrst story appeared anonymously two years later in the New York Continental Monthly and his ﬁrst book reviews in the North American
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. 1843.Y. as a naturalized English citizen. and London during their teens. N.—d. and spent their preadolescent years in Manhattan. U. He was named for his father.7
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reversal of the original verdict. Zola was recognized not only as one of the greatest novelists in Europe but also as a man of action—a defender of truth and justice. Paris. were schooled by tutors and governesses. 28.S. Returned to Geneva. theory. At the time of his death. 1916. When he was 19 years of age Henry enrolled at the Harvard Law School.)
H
enry James was an American novelist and. New Y ork. and Nathaniel Hawthorne. a champion of the poor and the persecuted. and was the younger brother of the pragmatist philosopher William James.

In The Spoils of Poynton (1897). with a retrospective working out. in the Victorian world. What Maisie Knew (1897). The Ambassadors (1903). James began his long expatriation in the 1870s. he inaugurated a career that saw about 100 volumes through the press during the next 40 years. her “free spirit.” her refusal to be treated. and The Turn of the Screw (1898). and further advanced his reputation with The Europeans that same year. In The Bostonians (1886) and The Princess Casamassima (1886). heralded by publication of the novel Roderick Hudson (1875). As a picture of Americans moving in the expatriate society of England and of Italy. he made use of complex moral and psychological ambiguity. of their drama. By his mid-20s James was regarded as one of the most skillful writers of short stories in America. In 1878 he achieved international renown with his story of an American ﬂirt in Rome. his ﬁrst collection of travel writings. Daisy Miller. With these three substantial books. The Wings of the Dove (1902). James’s reputation was founded on his versatile studies of “the American girl.” and he ended this ﬁrst phase of his career by producing his masterpiece. Subsequent works were many. a study of a young woman from Albany who brings to Europe her narrow provincialism and pretensions but also her sense of her own sovereignty. the story of an American sculptor’s struggle by the banks of the Tiber between his art and his passions. through multiple angles of vision. and The Golden Bowl (1904) were the great novels of the ﬁnal phase of his career. his subjects were social reformers and revolutionaries.7 Henry James
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Review. and a collection of tales. all showing a small group of characters in a tense situation. Transatlantic Sketches. In these late works James resorted to an
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. The Portrait of a Lady (1881). this novel has no equal in the history of modern ﬁction. merely as a marriageable object.

and pollution of resources and ﬁlled with misgivings over the anomalies of a “melting pot” civilization. On his return to England he wrote The American Scene (1907). James lived in retirement in an 18thcentury house at Rye in Sussex. To earn his living. 22. as well as at other jobs that he almost invariably lost. prophetic in its vision of urban doom. Jan. Stockholm)
A
ugust Strindberg was a Swedish playwright. which became dense and charged with symbolic imagery. and short-story writer who combined psychology and Naturalism in a new kind of European drama that evolved into Expressionist drama. he worked as a freelance journalist in Stockholm. James had lived abroad for 20 years. In his later years. poverty. Swed. his grandmother’s religious fanaticism. He devoted three years to rewriting and revising his principal novels and tales for the highly selective “New York Edition.—d. though on completion of The Golden Bowl he revisited the United States in 1904–05. and in the interval America had become a great industrial and political power. 1849. novelist. which contain both reminiscence and exposition of his theories of ﬁction. preparing in turn for the ministry and a career in medicine but never taking a degree. James became a British subject in 1915 and received the Order of Merit from King George V. Throwing his moral weight into Britain’s struggle in World War I. For this edition James wrote 18 signiﬁcant prefaces. spoliation.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
(b. 1912. and neglect. May 14.” published in 24 volumes. Stockholm. He studied intermittently at the University of Uppsala. Meanwhile he struggled to complete his ﬁrst
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.7
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increasingly allusive prose style. Strindberg’s childhood was marred by emotional insecurity.

he combined the
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. and The Creditors (1888). but the case affected his mind. and the conﬂict between the sexes inspired some of the outstanding works written at this time. All of these were written in total revolt against contemporary social conventions. Miss Julie (1888). two years later they married. however. For several years he continued revising the play. when Strindberg. lost the custody of their four children. and he imagined himself persecuted. of which Lucky Peter’s Travels (1881) contains the most biting social criticism. He also wrote more plays. In 1874 he became a librarian at the Royal Library. In these bold and concentrated works. and in 1875 he met the Finno-Swedish Siri von Essen. The Red Room. In 1883 Strindberg left Stockholm with his family and for six years moved restlessly about the Continent. to his great grief. The Royal Theatre’s rejection of Mäster Olof deepened his pessimism and sharpened his contempt for ofﬁcial institutions and traditions. then the unhappy wife of an ofﬁcer of the guards. later recognized as the ﬁrst modern Swedish drama. such as The Father (1887). on the theme of the Swedish Reformation.7
August Strindberg
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important work. and stories. This was something new in Swedish ﬁction and made its author nationally famous. Although he was then approaching a state of complete mental breakdown. a satirical account of abuses and frauds in Stockholm society. Married. marriage stimulated his writing. he produced a great number of plays. and in 1879 he published his ﬁrst novel. At ﬁrst. Their intense but ultimately disastrous relationship ended in divorce in 1891. The publication in 1884 of the ﬁrst volume of his collected stories. novels. He returned to drama with new intensity. inﬂuenced by Shakespeare and by Henrik Ibsen’s Brand. even by Siri. He was acquitted. the historical drama Mäster Olof (published in 1872). led to a prosecution for blasphemy.

followed in 1893. the crisis that he described in Inferno. His second marriage.7
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techniques of dramatic Naturalism—including unaffected dialogue. In 1892 he went abroad again. re-created him as a writer. stark rather than luxurious scenery. settling ﬁrst in Lund and then. His view that life is ruled by the “Powers. By this time Strindberg had again returned to Sweden. in 1899. was reﬂected in a series of historical plays that he began in 1889. a vigorous novel about the Stockholm skerries (rocky islands). His new faith. To Damascus.” a wanderer seeking spiritual peace and ﬁnding it with another character. emotional and physical stress. was also produced during this intensively creative phase. The years after his return to Sweden in 1889 were lonely and unhappy. they ﬁnally parted in Paris in 1895. always one of Strindberg’s happiest sources of inspiration. coloured by mysticism. Gustav V is the best. in Stockholm. characterization. Even though revered as a famous writer who had become the voice of modern Sweden. to Berlin. Frida Uhl. and its vigorous dialogue. The immediate result was a drama in three parts. The People of Hemsö. where he lived until his death. During these years Strindberg devoted considerable time to experiments in alchemy and to the study of theosophy.” punitive but righteous. in which he depicts himself as “the Stranger. and considerable mental instability culminated in a kind of religious conversion. Of these. “the Lady.” who resembles both Siri and Frida. The summers he often spent among his beloved skerries. masterly in its ﬁrmness of conasa struction. he was by now an alcoholic unable to ﬁnd steady employment. A period of literary sterility. thereby inaugurating a new movement in European drama. In 1901 he married the young Norwegian actress Harriet
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. to a young Austrian journalist. and the use of stage props as symbols—with his own conception of psychology.

France)
O
scar Wilde was an Irish wit.” as he called it. embody further developments of his dramatic technique: of these. Nov. He was a spokesman for the late 19th-century Aesthetic movement in England. which awarded him a degree with honours. Ire. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). “Black Banners”). Kammarspel (“Chamber Plays”). this “spring in winter. 16. a symbolic presentation of his own life.
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. Oxford (1874–78). appeared in 1909. which Strindberg ran for a time with a young producer. Oct. by the Swedish Academy but mourned by his countrymen as their greatest writer. The Great Highway. anticipating much in later European drama. in 1904 they parted. On Swedish life and letters he has exercised a lasting inﬂuence.—d. among other works. 1854. and dramatist whose reputation rests on his only novel. August Falck. inspired. The Ghost Sonata (1907) is the most fantastic. Yet his last marriage. 30. Wilde went. as in life. and he was the object of celebrated civil and criminal suits involving homosexuality and ending in his imprisonment. as Strindberg saw them. Dublin (1871–74). and on his comic plays. Dublin. which attacked the vices and follies of Stockholm’s literary coteries.7 August Strindberg
7
Bosse. to Trinity College. poet. which advocated art for art’s sake. written for the little Intima Theatre. Renewed bitterness after his parting from his last wife provoked the grotesquely satirical novel Svarta Fanor (1907. 1900. His last play.
OSCAR WILDE
(b. and Magdalen College. the plays The Dance of Death and A Dream Play. as well as the charming autobiography Ensam (“Alone”) and some lyrical poems. Paris. his ﬁfth. He was ignored in death. and again Strindberg lost the child. on successive scholarships.

But neither his wit nor popularity could keep him from doing hard time in an Irish prison.7 The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time
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Oscar Wilde’s plays were ﬁlled with bon mots. regarding marriage and social propriety. or clever sayings. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division 230
.

he employed his paradoxical. two children. revised and expanded by six chapters.” partly on Wilde. Wilde. a poseur. In 1884 Wilde married Constance Lloyd. insisted on the amoral nature of art regardless of an apparently moral ending. His ﬁrst success. But Wilde’s greatest successes were his society comedies. a “ﬂeshly poet. however. and in their comic opera Patience. In his only novel. and a wit but also as a poet by winning the coveted Newdigate Prize in 1878 with a long poem. Ravenna. The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in Lippincott’s Magazine. when Aestheticism was the rage and despair of literary London. Soon the periodical Punch made him the satiric object of its antagonism to the Aesthetes for what was considered their unmasculine devotion to art. were born. Critics charged immorality despite Dorian’s self-destruction. Lady Windermere’s Fan.7 Oscar Wilde
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During these four years. he distinguished himself not only as a classical scholar. Wilde wrote and published nearly all of his major works. Cyril and Vyvyan. In the ﬁnal decade of his life. Wilde combined the supernatural elements of the Gothic novel with the unspeakable sins of French decadent ﬁction. Within the conventions of the French “well-made play” (with its social intrigues and artiﬁcial devices to resolve conﬂict). Wilde was a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and then became editor of Woman’s World (1887–89). 1891). In the early 1880s. Several volumes of essays. daughter of a prominent Irish barrister. 1890. demonstrated that this wit could revitalize the rusty
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. epigrammatic wit to create a form of comedy new to the 19th-century English theatre. stories. and fairy tales also were published in 1891. Meanwhile. Gilbert and Sullivan based the character Bunthorne. Wilde established himself in social and artistic circles by his wit and ﬂamboyance. in 1885 and 1886. and in book form.

urged by Douglas. Douglas’s father. Urged to ﬂee to
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. were produced early in 1895. when the evidence went against him. Accused. his greatest achievement. A second society comedy. I never travel without my diary. All women become like their mothers. exposure of a secret sin or indiscretion and consequent disgrace is a central design. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. however. and an English translation appeared in 1894 with Aubrey Beardsley’s celebrated illustrations. In the same year. Wilde. An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. as Wilde insisted in his essay “The Decay of Lying” (1889). the conventional elements of farce are transformed into satiric epigrams—seemingly trivial but mercilessly exposing Victorian hypocrisies:
I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. sued for criminal libel. It was published in 1893. In the latter. by the marquess of being a sodomite. A Woman of No Importance.
In many of his works. to make his audience shudder by its depiction of unnatural passion. ﬁnally. That is their tragedy. written in French and designed. If life imitated art. his close friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas. infuriated the Marquess of Queensberry. In addition. But to be out of it simply a tragedy. were halted by the censor because it contained biblical characters. was produced in 1893. In rapid succession. he was himself approximating the pattern in his reckless pursuit of pleasure. Wilde’s ﬁnal plays. To be in it is merely a bore. rehearsals of his macabre play Salomé. No man does. Wilde’s case collapsed. whom he had met in 1891. and he dropped the suit. as he said. That’s his.7
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machinery of French drama.

In May 1897 Wilde was released and immediately went to France. Rimbaud sent to the poet Paul Verlaine samples of his new poetry. At the end of August 1871. revealing his concern for inhumane prison conditions. which he had long admired. In a burst of self-conﬁdence. Marseille)
A
rthur Rimbaud was a French poet and adventurer who won renown among the Symbolist movement and markedly inﬂuenced modern poetry. he had begun by age 16 to write violent. and he formulated an aesthetic doctrine stating that a poet must become a seer. Charleville. In the retrial he was found guilty and sentenced. unable to believe that his world was at an end. He was arrested and ordered to stand trial. impressed by their brilliance.7
Oscar Wilde
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France by his friends. summoned Rimbaud to Paris and sent the money for his fare. Nov. but the jury failed to reach a verdict. in May 1895. In his semiconscious ﬁnal moments. 20. 1854. Wilde refused. Wilde testiﬁed brilliantly. France—d. was The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). to two years at hard labour. break down the restraints and controls on personality. blasphemous poems. he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Most of his sentence was served at Reading Gaol. He died suddenly of acute meningitis brought on by an ear infection.
ARTHUR RIMBAUD
(b. Rimbaud composed
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. The provincial son of an army captain. 1891. on the advice of a friend. Oct. Verlaine. His only remaining work. and thus become the instrument for the voice of the eternal. however. hoping to regenerate himself as a writer. where he wrote a long letter to Douglas (published in 1905 in a drastically cut version as De Profundis) ﬁlled with recriminations against the younger man for encouraging him in dissipation and distracting him from his work. 10.

In May 1872 Rimbaud was recalled to Paris by Verlaine. “The Drunken Boat”). where he ﬁnished Une Saison en enfer. “Adieu” (“Goodbye”). In April 1873 Rimbaud left him to return to his family. Rimbaud
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. which displays his astonishing verbal virtuosity and a daring choice of images and metaphors. As he was leaving Verlaine shot him. wounding him in the wrist. A Season in Hell). and Verlaine was arrested and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. that he began to apply himself to another major work. they try to abolish the distinction between reality and hallucination. and it was at their farm at Roche. In the book’s ﬁnal section.7
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Le Bateau ivre (written 1871. near Charleville. and Rimbaud was blamed for breaking up Verlaine’s marriage. A month later Verlaine persuaded Rimbaud to accompany him to London. where they spent the following winter. becoming involved in a homosexual relationship with Verlaine that gave rise to scandal. During this winter Rimbaud composed a series of 40 prose poems to which he gave the title Illuminations. and after more wanderings and quarrels. perhaps his ﬁnest poem. who said that he could not live without him. That July Verlaine abandoned his wife and child and ﬂed with Rimbaud to London. These are his most ambitious attempt to develop new poetic forms from the content of his visions. Rimbaud treated Verlaine with sadistic cruelty. Rimbaud soon returned to Roche. Rimbaud was hospitalized. Une Saison en enfer (1873. The two poets’ relationship was growing so tense and violent that Verlaine became physically ill and mentally disturbed. It is a remarkable work of self-confession and psychological examination. he embarked upon a life of drink and debauchery. Once in Paris. he rejoined Verlaine in Brussels only to make a last farewell. which consists of nine fragments of prose and verse. The two men were soon being seen in public as lovers.

In 1875 he set out to see the world. joined and deserted the Dutch colonial army in the East Indies. 1856. Dublin. and he left Ireland to join his mother and elder sister in London. who sent him to Hārer (now in Ethiopia).)
G
eorge Bernard Shaw was an Irish comic dramatist. and his evenings in search of additional self-education in the lectures and debates that characterized contemporary middle-class London intellectual activities. and socialist propagandist and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. He spent his afternoons in the British Museum reading room. from the literary point of view. In 1880 he found employment in the service of a coffee trader at Aden (now in Yemen). and his report of this expedition was published by France’s National Society of Geography in 1884. Lawrence. Ayot St. He made his fortune in Ethiopia. was silence. In 1876 Shaw resolved to become a writer. Ire. 1950. it is a poem sometimes read as Rimbaud’s farewell to creative writing. Nov. The rest of Rimbaud’s life. and cancer was diagnosed. but in early 1891 he returned to France plagued by a tumour on his right knee. and worked as a labourer in Cyprus. writing novels and reading what he had missed at school. The leg was amputated. Eng.
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. He became the ﬁrst white man to journey into the Ogaden region of Ethiopia.7 Arthur Rimbaud
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takes a nostalgic backward look at his past life and then moves on. 2. and by 1879 he had crossed the Alps on foot.—d.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
(b. Hertfordshire. visited Egypt. in every instance suffering illness or other hardships. Shaw in his 20s suffered continuous frustration and poverty. he died several months later. literary critic. July 26.

as were most of the articles he submitted to the press for a decade. published 1930) repelled every publisher in London. In his ﬁrst play. to which he also contributed two sections. He became a vegetarian. The ﬁrst of the second group. Shaw found himself during the 1880s. Arms and the Man (performed 1894). which concerns prostitution. a socialist. and tentatively a playwright. in that position he used all his wit and polemical powers in a campaign to displace the artiﬁcialities and hypocrisies of the Victorian stage with a theatre of vital ideas. Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889). in 1885 the drama critic William Archer found Shaw steady journalistic work. a spellbinding orator. it was written in 1893 but barred from performance until 1902. he emphasized social and economic issues instead of romance. He described his ﬁrst plays as “unpleasant” because they forced the spectator to face unpleasant facts. He also began writing his own plays.7
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His ﬁction failed utterly. these plays include Mrs. Despite his failure as a novelist. The semiautobiographical and aptly titled Immaturity (1879. He followed these with several “pleasant” plays in an effort to ﬁnd the producers and audiences that his mordant comedies had offended. a middle-class socialist group that aimed at the transformation of English society not through revolution but through permeation of the country’s intellectual and political life. most visibly as editor of one of the classics of British socialism. Widowers’ Houses (performed 1892). W arren’s Profession. a polemicist. Eventually. Shaw involved himself in every aspect of its activities.
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. His next four novels were similarly refused. But Shaw truly began to make his mark when he was recruited to the Saturday Review as theatre critic (1895–98). He became the force behind the newly founded (1884) Fabian Society. adopting the ironic comedic tone that would characterize all his work.

and The Doctor’s Dilemma (performed 1906). a chronicle play about Joan of Arc. But by the 1920s he had returned to drama. a prodigious lecturer and essayist on politics. though sometimes mordant. Possibly Shaw’s comedic masterpiece. his reputation lagged in England. It was only with the production of John Bull’s Other Island (performed 1904) in London. He was also the most trenchant pamphleteer since Swift. the latter two using high comedy for serious purposes. with a special performance for Edward VII. economics. is Pygmalion (performed 1913). Candida (performed 1897) and You Never Can Tell (performed 1899) are other “pleasant” plays. Major Barbara (performed 1905). Shaw used his buoyant wit to keep himself in the public eye to the end of his 94 years. most notably with Saint Joan (performed 1923). but the play is a humane comedy about love and the English class system. and always a showman. irreverent.
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. World War I was a watershed for Shaw. Acclaim for it led to the awarding of the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature to Shaw (he refused the award). Shaw soon became established as a major playwright on the Continent by the performance of his plays there. Impudent. the best theatre critic of his generation. He was not merely the best comic dramatist of his time but also one of the most signiﬁcant playwrights in the English language since the 17th century. and one of the most proliﬁc letter writers in literature. but. that Shaw’s stage reputation was belatedly made in England. the most readable music critic in English. At ﬁrst he ceased writing plays. It was claimed by Shaw to be a didactic drama about phonetics. fun of romantic falsiﬁcations of both love and warfare. curiously.7 George Bernard Shaw
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has a Balkan setting and makes lighthearted. and certainly his funniest and most popular play. Other plays of about the same time include Man and Superman (performed 1905). and sociological subjects.

17. The play Ivanov (1887–89) culminates in the suicide of a young man nearer to the author’s own age. He began his writing career as the author of anecdotes for humorous journals. became a doctor in 1884. Badenweiler. In 1888. Together with other works of this period. signing his early work pseudonymously. With the work in question—a long story entitled “Steppe”—he at last turned his back on comic ﬁction. Jan. Chekhov also wrote several profoundly tragic studies at this time. Severny vestnik (“Northern Herald”). Old Style]. 1860.)
A
nton Pavlovich Chekhov was a major Russian playwright and master of the modern short story. Gradually this serious vein absorbed him and soon predominated over the comic. the son of a former serf. They explore the experiences of the mentally or physically ill in a spirit that reminds one that the
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. Taganrog. “Steppe. is the ﬁrst among more than 50 stories published in a variety of journals and selections between 1888 and his death in 1904. Chekhov published his ﬁrst work in a leading literary review. July 14/15 [July 1/2]. Russia—d. 29 [Jan. Chekhov. He had also experimented in serious writing. 1904. By 1888 he had become widely popular with a “lowbrow” public and had already produced a body of work more voluminous than all his later writings put together. He is regarded as the outstanding representative of the late 19th-century Russian realist school.7
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ANTON CHEKHOV
(b. Ger. this play belongs to a group among Chekhov’s works that have been called clinical studies.” an autobiographical work describing a journey in the Ukraine as seen through the eyes of a child. providing studies of human misery and despair at variance with the frenzied facetiousness of his comic work.

it was almost hissed off the stage. and others. misnamed a comedy. the play was revived by the newly created Moscow Art Theatre. His Wood Demon (1888–89) is a long-winded and ineptly facetious four-act play. was badly received. By the late 1880s many critics had begun to reprimand Chekhov for holding no ﬁrm political and social views and for failing to endow his works with a sense of direction. Chayka (The Seagull) was ﬁrst performed in St. having suffered one of the most traumatic experiences of his life and vowing never to write for the stage again. Sakhalin. Petersburg in 1896. some of
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. became converted—largely by cutting— into Dyadya V anya (Uncle V anya). The conversion—to a superb study of aimlessness in a rural manor house—took place some time between 1890 and 1896. by a miracle of art. Other dramatic efforts of the period include several of the uproarious one-act farces known as vaudevilles: Medved (The Bear).7
Anton Checkov
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author was himself a qualiﬁed—and remained a sporadically practicing—doctor. who was unpolitical and philosophically uncommitted. The Seagull is a study of the clash between the older and younger generations as it affects two actresses and two writers. which somehow. one of his greatest stage masterpieces. enjoying considerable success and helping to reestablish Chekhov as a dramatist. however. Chekhov had continued his experiments as a dramatist. This four-act drama. the play was published in 1897. In early 1890 he suddenly sought relief from the irritations of urban intellectual life by undertaking a one-man sociological expedition to a remote island. Chekhov was greatly distressed and left the auditorium during the second act. Two years later. During the years just before and after his Sakhalin expedition. indeed. Such expectations irked Chekhov. Predlozheniye (The Proposal).

May 7. and painter. Less than six months after its ﬁrst performance Chekhov died of tuberculosis.7
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the details having been suggested by episodes in the lives of Chekhov’s friends. But much as Chekhov owed to the theatre’s two founders. India—d. playwright. 1941. symptoms of which had become apparent considerably earlier. In Three Sisters Chekhov sensitively portrays the longings of a trio of provincial young women. Chekhov’s two last plays—Tri sestry (1901. an unduly low sum. and he is
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. Calcutta)
R
abindranath Tagore. The Cherry Orchard)—were both written for the Moscow Art Theatre. Calcutta. Three Sisters) and Vishnyovy sad (1904. a Bengali poet. 7. he remained dissatisﬁed with such rehearsals and performances of his plays as he was able to witness. to a publisher for 75. excluding plays. was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.000 rubles. Never a successful ﬁnancial manager. Aug. Vladimir NemirovichDanchenko and Konstanin Stanislavsky. song composer. short-story writer. Tagore introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
(b. In March 1897 Chekhov had suffered a lung hemorrhage caused by tuberculosis. thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. essayist. portraying characters who remain comic despite their very poignancy. Chekhov attempted to regularize his literary affairs in 1899 by selling the copyright of all his existing works. He was highly inﬂuential in introducing the best of Indian culture to the West and vice versa. 1861. while in The Cherry Orchard he offered a poignant picture of the Russian landowning class in decline.

.” date from the 1890s and have a poignancy. Most of his ﬁnest short stories.000 songs. Years of sadness arising from the deaths of his wife and two children between 1902
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. in close contact with village folk. which remain extremely popular among all classes of Bengali society. The Golden Boat). and his sympathy for their poverty and backwardness became the keynote of much of his later writing. as are his more than 2. a collection that marks the maturing of his genius. which became Viśva-Bhārati University in 1921. It contains some of his best-known poems. There he published several books of poetry in the 1880s and completed Mānasī (1890). including many in verse forms new to Bengali. and plays. notably Chitrāngadā (1892. The son of the religious reformer Debendranath Tagore. In 1891 Tagore went to East Bengal (now in Bangladesh) to manage his family’s estates at Shilaidah and Shazadpur for 10 years. an oftenrepeated image in his verse. He settled permanently at the school. There he often stayed in a houseboat on the Padma River (i. After incomplete studies in England in the late 1870s. notably Sonār Tarī (1894. where he sought to blend the best in the Indian and Western traditions. Chitra). In 1901 Tagore founded an experimental school in rural West Bengal at Śantiniketan (“Abode of Peace”). laced with gentle irony. that is unique to him.e. though admirably captured by the director Satyajit Ray in later ﬁlm adaptations. most of all the Padma River.7
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generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of modern India. which examine “humble lives and their small miseries. he early began to write verses. as well as some social and political satire that was critical of his fellow Bengalis. Tagore’s poems are virtually untranslatable. During these years he published several poetry collections. Tagore came to love the Bengali countryside. the Ganges River). he returned to India.

In 1883 he attended the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. his family moved to London. where he attended the high school. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. and supernatural legend—would colour Yeats’s work and form the setting of many of his poems. In the late 1920s. when Yeats was only two. Dublin.7 Rabindranath Tagore
7
and 1907 are reﬂected in his later poetry. Song Offerings (1912). This country—its scenery.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
(b. Tagore was awarded a knighthood in 1915. but he spent much of his boyhood and school holidays in Sligo. dramatist. June 13.—d. the best known are Gorā (1910) and Ghare-Bāire (1916. 28. was hailed by W. containing Tagore’s English prose translations of religious poems from several of his Bengali verse collections. but he repudiated it in 1919 as a protest against the Amritsar Massacre. In 1867. and East Asia and becoming an eloquent spokesperson for the cause of Indian independence. folklore. Yeats and André Gide and won him the Nobel Prize in 1913. Ire. in western Ireland. Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. B. 1865. and prose writer William Butler Yeats was one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. the Americas. France)
he Irish poet. Tagore took up painting and produced works that won him a place among India’s foremost contemporary artists. 1939. including Gītāñjali (1910). where
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T
. which was introduced to the West in Gitanjali. are also worthy of attention. Tagore’s novels. with his grandparents. This book. Jan. lecturing and reading from his work in Europe. The Home and the World). In 1880 his family moved back to Dublin. Sandymount. though less outstanding than his poems and short stories. at nearly 70 years of age. From 1912 Tagore spent long periods out of India.

When Yeats’s play Cathleen ni Houlihan was ﬁrst performed in Dublin in 1902. and Other Poems (1889). a soul’s cry for release from circumstance. He became friends with William Morris and W. but mostly for love of Maud. When Yeats joined in the Irish nationalist cause. drama. often beautiful but always rareﬁed. art. a rebel. E. by literature. when he met Augusta Lady Gregory. he did so partly from conviction. The Celtic Twilight (1893). an Irish beauty. Yeats quickly became involved in the literary life of London. His ﬁrst publication. Henley. Yeats felt that Irish political life lost its signiﬁcance. ardent and brilliant. commanding in voice and in person. In 1889 Yeats met Maud Gonne. whose members included his friends Lionel Johnson and Arthur Symons. but progress was slow until 1898. Meanwhile. Yeats took up the life of a professional writer.
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. appeared in the Dublin University Review in 1885. He fell in love with her. and he was a cofounder of the Rhymers’ Club. was Yeats’s ﬁrst effort toward this end. and legend. whose mysticism appealed to him because it was a form of imaginative life far removed from the workaday world. collected in The W anderings of Oisin. Her passion was lavished upon Ireland.7
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the most important part of his education was in meeting other poets and artists. His early poems. and a rhetorician. but she was not in love with him. a volume of essays. she was an Irish patriot. two brief lyrics. poetry. Yeats was beginning to write. When the family moved back to London in 1887. He joined the Theosophical Society. After the rapid decline and death of the controversial Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891. are the work of an aesthete. The vacuum left by politics might be ﬁlled. he felt. an aristocrat who was to become a playwright and his close friend. she played the title role.

7 William Butler Yeats
7
Yeats (along with Lady Gregory and others) was one of the originators of the Irish Literary Theatre. on the foundation of the Irish Free State. Yeats’s own tower. The otherworldly. is the work of a fully accomplished artist. the Easter Rising and the Irish civil war. The poems in both of these works use. he managed the theatre’s affairs. In 1922. The Tower (1928). and the author’s interest in contemporary psychical research. some of Yeats’s greatest verse was written subsequently. To the end of his life Yeats remained a director of this theatre. which became the Abbey Theatre in 1904. In 1917 Yeats published The Wild Swans at Coole. the experience of a lifetime is brought to perfection of form. in it. From then onward he reached and maintained the height of his achievement—a renewal of inspiration and a perfecting of technique that are almost without parallel in the history of English poetry. ecstatic atmosphere of the early lyrics has cleared. Still. the Byzantine Empire and its mosaics. In 1923 he was awarded
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. as their dominant subjects and symbols. Plato. which gave its ﬁrst performance in Dublin in 1899 with Yeats’s play The Countess Cathleew. named after the castle he owned and had restored. Yeats accepted an invitation to become a member of the new Irish Senate: he served for six years. encouraged its playwrights (notably John Millington Synge). and contributed many of his own plays that became part of the Abbey Theatre’s repertoire. a more sparse and resonant imagery. and Porphyry. The years from 1909 to 1914 mark a decisive change in his poetry. Plotinus. and a new directness with which Yeats confronts reality and its imperfections. appearing in The Winding Stair (1929). and the poems in Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (1914) show a tightening and hardening of his verse line. In the crucial period from 1899 to 1907.

Rome)
L
uigi Pirandello was an Italian playwright. 1936. and from his spiritual growth and his gradual acquisition of personal wisdom. He had already published an early volume of verse. Sicily. a wealthy sulfur merchant. drama. Agrigento. Now a celebrated ﬁgure. Italy—d. and prose. from his experiments in a wide range of forms of poetry. He died in January 1939 while abroad.
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. novelist. Dec.7
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the Nobel Prize for Literature. With his invention of the “theatre within the theatre” in the play Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (1921. Yeats’s work of this period takes its strength from his long and dedicated apprenticeship to poetry. In 1891 Pirandello gained his Doctorate in Philology for a thesis on the dialect of Agrigento. 1867. Had Yeats ceased to write at age 40. the daughter of a business associate. which paid tribute to the poetic fashions set by Giosuè Carducci. which he incorporated into the framework of his own mythology. June 28. There is no precedent in literary history for a poet who produces his greatest work between the ages of 50 and 75. he was indisputably one of the most signiﬁcant modern poets. Six Characters in Search of an Author). But his ﬁrst signiﬁcant works were short stories.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO
(b. In 1894 his father arranged his marriage to Antonietta Portulano. he would probably now be valued as a minor poet writing in a dying PreRaphaelite tradition that had drawn renewed beauty and poignancy for a time from the Celtic revival. he became an important innovator in modern drama. This marriage gave him ﬁnancial independence. 10. Mal giocondo (1889). and short-story writer who won the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. This was followed by other volumes of verse. allowing him to live in Rome and to write.

and a Hundred Thousand). his wife developed a persecution mania. Although the theme is not typically “Pirandellian. The Late Mattia Pascal). Pirandello was forced to earn his living not only by writing but also by teaching Italian at a teacher’s college in Rome.7 Luigi Pirandello
7
In 1903 a landslide shut down the sulfur mine in which his wife’s and his father’s capital was invested. One. Pirandello’s early narrative style stems from the verismo (“realism”) of two Italian novelists of the late 19th century—Luigi Capuana and Giovanni Verga. The Old and The Young) and Uno. but Così è (se vi pare) began the series of plays that were to make him world famous in the
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. This delay may have been fortunate for the development of his dramatic powers. Il fu Mattia Pascal (1904. already perceptible in his early short stories—the exploration of the tightly closed world of the forever changeable human personality. It was this bitter experience that ﬁnally determined the theme of his most characteristic work. notably I vecchi e i giovani (1913. often acclaimed as his best. which manifested itself in a frenzied jealousy of her husband. Success came with his third novel. Pirandello also wrote over 50 plays. nessuno e centomila (1925–26. Suddenly poor. None. followed. it already shows the acute psychological observation that was later to be directed toward the exploration of his characters’ subconscious. As a further result of the ﬁnancial disaster. L’epilogo does not greatly differ from other drama of its period.” since the obstacles confronting its hero result from external circumstances. Other novels. He had ﬁrst turned to the theatre in 1898 with L’epilogo. but the accidents that prevented its production until 1910 (when it was retitled La morsa) kept him from other than sporadic attempts at drama until the success of Così è (se vi pare) in 1917. His torment ended only with her removal to a sanatorium in 1919 (she died in 1959).

it anticipates Pirandello’s two great plays. The universal acclaim that followed Six Characters and Henry IV sent Pirandello touring the world (1925–27) with his own company. of the Teatro d’Arte in 1928. just as in some of the later short stories it is the surrealistic and fantastic elements that are accentuated. the Teatro d’Arte in Rome.7
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1920s. perhaps. It also emboldened him to disﬁgure some of his later plays (e.. Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Enrico IV (1922. Characters that have been rejected by their author materialize on stage. The play ﬁnds dramatic strength in its hero’s choice of retirement into unreality in preference to life in the uncertain world. After the dissolution. and a rejection of the idea of any objective reality not at the mercy of individual vision. the horse and the coachman. The production of Six Characters in Paris in 1923 made Pirandello widely known. and his work became one of the central inﬂuences on the French theatre. which is an inconstant ﬂux. of the relativity of truth. which lies just under the skin of ordinary life and is. Six Characters is the most arresting presentation of the typical Pirandellian contrast between art. In his will he requested that there should be no public ceremony marking his death—only “a hearse of the poor.”
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. distort their drama as they attempt its presentation. Its title can be translated as Right You Are (If You Think You Are). inevitably. because of ﬁnancial losses. Pirandello spent his remaining years in frequent and extensive travel. superior to ordinary life in its construction of a satisfying reality. A demonstration. who. throbbing with a more intense vitality than the real actors. which is unchanging. Ciascuno a suo modo [1924]) by calling attention to himself. And in Henry IV the theme is madness.g. and life. Henry IV). in dramatic terms.

July 10. Flaubert. Proust was the son of an eminent physician of provincial French Catholic descent and the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family.7 Marcel Proust
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MARCEL PROUST
(b. 1871. begun in 1907.
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. an autobiographical novel that showed awakening genius. At least one early version was written in 1905–06. a seven-volume novel based on Proust’s life told psychologically and allegorically. Renan. near Paris. 18. when French politics and society were split by the movement to liberate the Jewish army ofﬁcer Alfred Dreyfus. through which he endeavoured to purge his style of extraneous inﬂuences. was laid aside in October 1908. Nov. courageously defying the risk of social ostracism. A gradual disengagement from social life coincided with growing ill health and with his active involvement in the Dreyfus affair of 1897–99. a collection of short stories at once precious and profound. The death of Proust’s father in 1903 and of his mother in 1905 left him grief stricken and alone but ﬁnancially independent and free to attempt his great novel. France—d. From 1895 to 1899 he wrote Jean Santeuil. and others of Proust’s favourite French authors—called “L ’Affaire Lemoine” (published in Le Figaro). This had itself been interrupted by a series of brilliant parodies—of Balzac. After a ﬁrst attack in 1880. 1922. In 1896 he published Les Plaisirs et les jours (Pleasures and Days). Paris)
M
arcel Proust was a French novelist and is best known as the author of À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27. Auteuil. Another. Proust helped to organize petitions and assisted Dreyfus’s lawyer Labori. most of which had appeared during 1892–93 in the magazines Le Banquet and La Revue Blanche. Saint-Simon. In Search of Lost Time). unjustly imprisoned on Devil’s Island as a spy. he suffered from asthma throughout his life.

In December 1919. and construction. ﬁnishing the ﬁrst draft in September 1912. and Proust suddenly became world famous. The ﬁrst volume. he retired from the world to write his novel. In June 1919 À l’ombre des jeunes ﬁlles en ﬂeurs (Within a Budding Grove) was published simultaneously with a reprint of Swann and with Pastiches et mélanges. He thought of marrying “a very young and delightful girl” whom he met at Cabourg. was refused by the best-selling publishers Fasquelle and Ollendorff and even by the intellectual La Nouvelle Revue Française. a seaside resort in Normandy that became the Balbec of his novel. under the direction of the novelist André Gide. Instead. À l’ombre received the Prix Goncourt. through Léon Daudet’s recommendation. enriching and deepening its feeling. Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s W ay). but was ﬁnally issued at the author’s expense in November 1913 by the progressive young publisher Bernard Grasset and met with some success. In this majestic process he transformed a work that in its earlier state was still below the level of his highest powers into one of the greatest achievements of the modern novel. in July he began À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust then planned only two further volumes. with the beneﬁt of his ﬁnal revision. Three more installments appeared in his lifetime.7
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In January 1909 occurred the real-life incident of an involuntary revival of a childhood memory through the taste of tea and a rusk biscuit (which in his novel became madeleine cake). texture. the premature appearance of which was fortunately thwarted by his anguish at the ﬂight and death of his secretary Alfred Agostinelli and by the outbreak of World War I. and tripling its length. where he spent summer holidays from 1907 to 1914. During the war he revised the remainder of his novel. comprising Le Côté de
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. a miscellaneous volume containing “L ’Affaire Lemoine” and other works. increasing the realistic and satirical elements.

1874. He became an enthusiastic botanist and acquired his poetic persona of a New England rural sage during the years he and his family spent at Derry. printed his poem My Butterﬂy: An Elegy. Frost left Dartmouth after less than a year and married. New Hampshire. and for a time Frost also taught.
ROBERT FROST
(b. San Francisco. All this while he was
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. succumbing to a weakness of the lungs that many had mistaken for a form of hypochondria and struggling to the last with the revision of La Prisonnière (The Captive). and Le Temps retrouvé (1927. Proust died in Paris of pneumonia. Jan. The Fugitive).. a weekly literary journal. 29. 1963.—d.7 Marcel Proust
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Guermantes (1920–21. Albertine disparue (1925. neither with notable success. Calif. Boston. he ﬁrst achieved professional publication in 1894 when The Independent. and his realistic verse portraying ordinary people in everyday situations. From 1900 to 1909 the family raised poultry on a farm near Derry. in an advanced but not ﬁnal stage of revision: La Prisonnière (1923). by teaching school and farming. The Guermantes Way) and Sodome et Gomorrhe (1921–22. The novel remains one of the supreme achievements of modern ﬁction. Frost resumed his college education at Harvard University in 1897 but left after two years’ study there. Impatient with academic routine. Mass. Sodom and Gomorrah). U. Frost attended Dartmouth College and continued to labour on the poetic career he had begun in a small way during high school. The young poet supported his wife. March 26.S. The last three parts of À la recherche were published posthumously.)
he American poet Robert Frost was much admired for his depictions of the rural life of New England. his command of American colloquial speech. Elinor. Time Regained).

but publishing outlets showed little interest in them. Home Burial. and writers and publishers throughout the Northeast were aware that a writer of unusual abilities stood in their midst. who was nearly 40 years old. By then the Boston poet Amy Lowell’s review had already appeared in The New Republic. The outbreak of World War I brought the Frosts back to the United States in 1915. but Frost. had not published a single book of poems and had seen just a handful appear in magazines. in August 1912 the Frost family sailed across the Atlantic to England. Frost within a year had published A Boy’s Will (1913). Apple-Picking. and The Tuft of Flowers have remained standard anthology pieces. The American publishing house of Henry Holt had
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. through his own vigorous efforts and those of the expatriate American poet Ezra Pound. In 1911 ownership of the Derry farm passed to Frost. among them Mending W The Death of the Hired Man. North of Boston.7
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writing poems. By 1911 Frost was ﬁghting against discouragement. that introduced some of the most popular poems in all of Frost’s work. In London. A momentous decision was made: to sell the farm and use the proceeds to make a radical new start in London. Mowing. From this ﬁrst book. A Boy’s Will was followed in 1914 by a second collection. and After all. and. Poetry had always been considered a young person’s game. Frost’s name was frequently mentioned by those who followed the course of modern literature. Frost carried with him sheaves of verses he had written but not gotten into print. such poems as Storm Fear. English publishers in London did indeed prove more receptive to innovative verse. and soon American visitors were returning home with news of this unknown poet who was causing a sensation abroad. Accordingly. where publishers were perceived to be more receptive to new talent.

June 6. He was the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (1958–59). Switz. 1955. 1875. and. His reputation was further enhanced by New Hampshire (1923). Dartmouth (1943–49). Frost served as a poet-in-residence at Harvard (1939–43). That prize was also awarded to Frost’s Collected Poems (1930) and to the collections A Further Range (1936) and A Witness Tree (1942). Holt was adding the American edition of A Boy’s Will. Death in Venice). and Der Zauberberg (1924. New Hampshire. which received the Pulitzer Prize. and Amherst College (1949–63).7
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brought out its edition of North of Boston in 1914. 12. Frost bought a small farm at Franconia.)
homas Mann was a German novelist and essayist whose early novels—Buddenbrooks (1900). in 1915. Der Tod in Venedig (1912. by the time the Frost family landed in Boston. which continued the high level established by his ﬁrst books. Any remaining doubt about his poetic abilities was dispelled by the collection Mountain Interval (1916).
THOMAS MANN
(b. The Magic Mountain)—earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. Frost soon found himself besieged by magazines seeking to publish his poems. and in his old age he gathered honours and awards from every quarter. Aug. near Zürich. From this moment his career rose on an ascending curve. Lübeck.—d. but his income from both poetry and farming proved inadequate to support his family. Ger. and so he lectured and taught part-time at Amherst College and at the University of Michigan from 1916 to 1938. Never before had an American poet achieved such rapid fame after such a disheartening delay. and he recited his poem The Gift Outright at the inauguration of President John F. It became a best-seller.
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. Kennedy in 1961.

and inward culture as against moralistic civilization. reﬂect the aestheticism of the 1890s but are given depth by the inﬂuence of the philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the composer Wagner. The outbreak of World War I evoked Mann’s ardent patriotism and awoke. His early tales. Its theme grows out of an earlier motif: a young engineer. Hans Castorp. This work belongs to the tradition of “revolutionary conservatism” that leads from the 19thcentury German nationalistic and antidemocratic thinkers Paul Anton de Lagarde and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. creative irrationalism as against “ﬂat” rationalism. abandons practical life to submit to the rich seductions
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. Mann also wrote a tender elegy for the old bourgeois virtues. His new position was clariﬁed in the novel The Magic Mountain. an awareness of the artist’s social commitment. Buddenbrooks. With the establishment of the German (Weimar) Republic in 1919. In 1918 he published a large political treatise. Mann built the story of the family and its business house over four generations. collected as Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1898).7
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After perfunctory work in Munich in an insurance ofﬁce and on the editorial staff of Simplicissimus. Reﬂections of an Unpolitical Man. the apostle of the superiority of the “Germanic” race. to all of whom Mann was always to acknowledge a deep. Mann devoted himself to writing. in which all his ingenuity of mind was summoned to justify the authoritarian state as against democracy. too. Mann slowly revised his outlook. debt. toward National Socialism. In his ﬁrst novel. showing how an artistic streak not only unﬁts the family’s later members for the practicalities of business life but undermines their vitality as well. if ambiguous. visiting a cousin in a sanatorium in Davos. almost against his will. and Mann later was to repudiate these ideas. a satirical weekly. But.

In 1936 he was deprived of his German citizenship. But the sanatorium comes to be the spiritual reﬂection of the possibilities and dangers of the actual world. but he traveled widely. to Paris. In Doktor Faustus. In 1930 he gave a courageous address in Berlin. visiting the United States on lecture tours and ﬁnally. he refused to return to Germany to live. appealing for the formation of a common front of the cultured bourgeoisie and the socialist working class against the inhuman fanaticism of the National Socialists. in 1938.7
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of disease. His literary and cultural essays began to play an ever-growing part in elucidating and communicating his awareness of the fragility of humaneness. For some years his home was in Switzerland. “Ein Appell an die Vernunft” (“An Appeal to Reason”). In 1944 he became a U. begun in 1943 at the darkest
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. were warned by their son and daughter in Munich not to return. When Hitler became chancellor early in 1933. often expressed sympathy with socialist and communist principles in the very general sense that they were the guarantee of humanism and freedom. After the war. and reason in the face of political crisis. Vienna. and death. In the end. Warsaw. in the same year the University of Bonn took away the honorary doctorate it had bestowed in 1919 (it was restored in 1949). tolerance. From this time onward Mann’s imaginative effort was directed to the novel. on holiday in Switzerland. near Zürich.S. In 1952 he settled again near Zürich. Castorp decides for life and service to his people. settling there. Amsterdam. Mann. In essays and on lecture tours in Germany. From 1936 to 1944 Mann was a citizen of Czechoslovakia. and elsewhere during the 1930s. citizen. somewhat skeptically but humanely. The novels on which Mann was working throughout this period of exile reﬂect variously the cultural crisis of his times. Mann and his wife. while steadfastly attacking Nazi policy. inwardness.

even virtuoso style. show a relaxation of intensity in spite of their accomplished. estranged ﬁgure. and esteemed (his grandfather had been a government ofﬁcial in Beijing). Zhejiang province. Mann wrote the most directly political of his novels. 19.7
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period of the war. enriched by humour. China—d. he “speaks” the experience of his times in his music. irony. In 1893. Sept. Zhou Shuren had a happy childhood. however. wealthy. who dies in 1940 after 10 years of mental alienation. his grandfather was sentenced to prison for examination fraud. and the story of Leverkühn’s compositions is that of German culture in the two decades before 1930—more speciﬁcally of the collapse of traditional humanism and the victory of the mixture of sophisticated nihilism and barbaric primitivism that undermine it. 1936. published in 1951 and 1953. was a Chinese writer commonly considered the greatest in 20th-century Chinese literature. and his father became bedridden. Shanghai)
L
u Xun. born in 1885. brilliantly realistic on one level and yet reaching to deeper levels of symbolism. It is the life story of a German composer. The
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. and The Holy Sinner and The Black Swan. The composition of the novel was fully documented by Mann in 1949 in The Genesis of a Novel. A solitary. Oct. He was also an important critic known for his sharp and unique essays on the historical traditions and modern conditions of China. which is the pen name of Zhou Shuren. respectively. 25. Mann’s style is ﬁnely wrought and full of resources. 1881. Born to a family that was traditional. Adrian Leverkühn. his composition is subtle and many-layered. Doktor Faustus exhausted him as no other work of his had done.
LU XUN
(b. and parody. Shaoxing.

This experience is thought to have had a great inﬂuence on his writing. In 1902 he traveled to Japan to study Japanese and medical science. there he developed an interest in Darwin’s theory of evolution. which the madman narrator sees as a “man-eating” society. which was marked by sensitivity and pessimism.7 Lu Xun
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family’s reputation declined. Modeled on the Russian realist Nikolay Gogol’s tale of the same title. but the project failed to attract interest. That year. with his younger brother Zhou Zuoren. Zhou Shuren left his hometown in 1899 and attended a mining school in Nanjing. In 1903 he began to write articles for radical magazines edited by Chinese students in Japan. it was a tour de force that attracted immediate attention and helped gain acceptance for the short-story form as an effective literary vehicle. to privilege the new and fresh over the old and traditional. the story is a condemnation of traditional Confucian culture. a two-volume translation of 19th-century European stories. at the urging of friends. In 1905 he entered an arranged marriage against his will. Disillusioned. which became an important inﬂuence in his work. After working for several years as a teacher in his hometown and then as a low-level government ofﬁcial in Beijing. Chinese intellectuals of the time understood Darwin’s theory to encourage the struggle for social reform. and while there he became a supporter of the Chinese revolutionaries who gathered there. In 1909 he published. and they were treated with disdain by their community and relatives. in the hope that it would inspire readers to revolution. he published his nowfamous short story Kuangren riji (“Diary of a Madman”). The ﬁrst published Western-style story written wholly in vernacular Chinese. Lu Xun returned to China later that year.
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. Lu Xun returned to writing and became associated with the nascent Chinese literary movement in 1918.

Forced by these political and personal circumstances to ﬂee Beijing in 1926. which were published in the collection Yecao (1927. Wild Grass). are also considered signiﬁcant. which was aggravated by conﬂicts in his personal and professional life. it is a repudiation of the old order. his disagreements with Zhou Zuoren (who had also become one of the leading intellectuals in Beijing) led to a rift between the two brothers in 1926. Such depressing conditions led Lu Xun to formulate the idea that one could resist social darkness only when he was pessimistic about the society. His various symbolic prose poems. His famous phrase “resistance of despair” is commonly considered a core concept of his thought. Lu Xun continued to struggle with his increasingly pessimistic view of Chinese society.” These stories. His academic study Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue (1923–24.7
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Another representative work is the novelette A-Q zhengzhuan (1921. established Lu Xun’s reputation as the leading Chinese writer. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction) and companion compilations of classical ﬁction remain standard works. A mixture of humour and pathos. Call to Arms). In addition to marital troubles and mounting pressures from the government. Lu Xun traveled to Xiamen and
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. In the 1920s Lu Xun worked at various universities in Beijing as a part-time professor of Chinese script and literature. it added “Ah Q-ism” to the modern Chinese language as a term characterizing the Chinese penchant for rationalizing defeat as a “spiritual victory. as well as his reminiscences and retold classical tales. Wandering) was published. Despite his success. The True Story of Ah Q). Three years later the collection Panghuang (1926. especially those of Russian works. His translations. which were collected in Nahan (1923. all reveal a modern sensibility informed by sardonic humour and biting satire.

In 1930 he became the nominal leader of the League of Left-Wing Writers. and other memorabilia. his former student.7
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Guangzhou. they had a son in 1929. In 1951 the Lu Xun Museum opened in Shanghai. English translations of Lu Xun’s works include Silent China: Selected Writings of Lu Xun (1973). Hengzhan. Lu Hsun: Complete Poems (1988). There he began to live with Xu Guangping. he considered himself a tongluren (fellow traveler). Many of his ﬁction and prose works have been incorporated into school textbooks. against both cultural conservatism and mechanical evolution. indicates the complex and tragic predicament of an intellectual in modern society. manuscripts. the government prohibited the publication of most of his work. and Diary of a Madman and Other Stories (1990). During the last several years of Lu Xun’s life. recruiting many writers and countrymen to the communist cause through his Chinese translations of Marxist literary theories. the most important idea in Lu Xun’s later thought. photographs. During the following decade he began to see the Chinese communists as the only salvation for his country. and he was politically attacked by many of their members. ﬁnally settling in Shanghai in 1927. In 1934 he described his political position as hengzhan (“horizontal stand”). Lu Xun stopped writing ﬁction and devoted himself to writing satiric critical essays (zawen). meaning he was struggling simultaneously against both the right and the left. which he used as a form of political protest. He criticized the Shanghai communist literary circles for their embrace of propaganda. so he published the majority of his new articles under various pseudonyms. as well as through his own political writing. it contains letters.
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. Although he himself refused to join the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese communist movement adopted Lu Xun posthumously as the exemplar of Socialist Realism.

when her mother died in 1895 at age 49. women’s writing. however. in 1897. Woolf also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory. leaving her three children and him one. through their nonlinear approaches to narrative. Julia Jackson Duckworth and Leslie Stephen married in 1878.7
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VIRGINIA WOOLF
(b.
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. Sussex)
V
irginia Woolf was an English writer whose novels. That annual relocation cleanly structured Woolf ’s childhood world. Thoby (born 1880). 25. especially Mrs. Jan. and Leslie’s ﬁrst wife. Julia Jackson. was an eminent literary ﬁgure and the ﬁrst editor (1882–91) of the Dictionary of National Biography. London. Eng. and four children followed: Vanessa (born 1879).
Early Life and Influences
Born Virginia Stephen. While she is best known for her novels. her half sister Stella Duckworth died at age 28. Woolf was just emerging from depression when.—d. after her father died. Her father. exerted a major inﬂuence on the genre. Then in 1904. 1882. had died unexpectedly. Virginia (born 1882). Her neatly divided. and Adrian (born 1883). near Rodmell. March 28. and the politics of power. Herbert Duckworth. a daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. possessed great beauty and a reputation for saintly self-sacriﬁce. The Stephen family made summer migrations from London to the rugged Cornwall coast. Both Julia Jackson’s ﬁrst husband. she had a nervous breakdown. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). she was the child of ideal Victorian parents. 1941. literary history. Leslie Stephen. Her mother. predictable world ended.

the novel’s central character. Virginia Woolf ’s mental health was precarious. Thoby died of typhoid fever. just before sailing to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to become a colonial administrator. After he resigned from the colonial service. is a sheltered young woman who.
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. even while privately she was writing her poignant Reminiscences—about her childhood and her lost mother— which was published in 1908. Between 1910 and 1915. Rachel Vinrace. While writing anonymous reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and other journals. who became engaged to Clive Bell just after Thoby’s death. Leonard and Virginia married in August 1912. Vanessa supervised the Stephen children’s move to the bohemian Bloomsbury section of London. She overcame the loss of Thoby and the “loss” of Vanessa. she experimented with such a novel.
Early Fiction
Woolf determined in 1908 to “re-form” the novel. which she called Melymbrosia. after a family excursion to Greece in 1906. In the summer of 1911. Soon the Stephens hosted weekly gatherings of radical young people. Vanessa’s marriage (and perhaps Thoby’s absence) helped transform conversation at the avant-garde gatherings of what came to be known as the Bloomsbury group into irreverent repartee that inspired Woolf to exercise her wit publicly. through writing. is introduced to freedom and sexuality. she completely recast Melymbrosia as The Voyage Out in 1913. Leonard Woolf returned from the East. Then. Nevertheless.7
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While she was recovering. on an excursion to South America. Virginia Woolf grieved but did not slip into depression. Leonard Woolf dined with them in November 1904. After an excursion up the Amazon.

with Vanessa Bell’s illustrations. Later that year she overcame the “vile imaginations” that had threatened her sanity. Her essay Modern Novels (1919. a story organized. their home in the London suburbs. revised in 1925 as Modern Fiction) attacked the “materialists” who wrote about superﬁcial rather than spiritual or “luminous” experiences. and suffrage. politics. Virginia’s Kew Gardens (1919). That indeterminacy set the book at odds with the certainties of the Victorian era and especially the conventions of realism. The Woolfs also printed by hand. The book endorses no explanation for her death. by
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. That April. and investigations of issues such as class. Proving that she could master the traditional form of the novel before breaking it. the latter about contemplation itself. In 1917 the Woolfs bought a printing press and founded the Hogarth Press. Woolf plotted her next novel in two romantic triangles. She kept the demons of mania and depression mostly at bay for the rest of her life. Woolf was writing nearly a review a week for the Times Literary Supplement in 1918. like a Post-Impressionistic painting. Woolf ’s manic-depressive worries provoked a suicide attempt in September 1913. realistic descriptions of early 20th-century settings. she sank into a distressed state in which she was often delirious. Publication of The Voyage Out was delayed until early 1915. The Woolfs themselves (she was the compositor while he worked the press) published their own Two Stories in the summer of 1917. It consisted of Leonard’s Three Jews and Virginia’s The Mark on the Wall.7 Virginia Woolf
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Rachel contracts a terrible illness that plunges her into delirium and then death. Night and Day (1919) focuses on the very sort of details that Woolf had deleted from The Voyage Out: credible dialogue. with its protagonist Katharine in both. named for Hogarth House.

rather. a relationship that would blossom into a lesbian affair. Dalloway (1925). Dalloway. but its essence evades them. which looked out over the Sussex Downs and the meadows where the River Ouse wound down to the English Channel. In Mrs. Three years later Woolf published Jacob’s Room. where they were less isolated from London society. With the Hogarth Press’s emergence as a major publishing house. Clarissa gives a grand party and Septimus commits suicide. in which she transformed personal grief over the death of Thoby Stephen into a “spiritual shape. Their lives come together when the doctor who was treating (or. Woolf thought of a foiling device that would pair that highly sensitive woman with a shell-shocked war victim. Woolf feared that she had ventured too far beyond representation.
Major Period
At the beginning of 1924.” Though Jacob’s Room is an antiwar novel. In 1919 they bought a cottage in Rodmell village called Monk’s House. the boorish doctors presume to understand personality. Having already written a story about a Mrs. mistreating) Septimus arrives at Clarissa’s party
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. This novel is as patterned as a Post-Impressionist painting but is also so accurately representational that the reader can trace Clarissa’s and Septimus’s movements through the streets of London on a single day in June 1923. the Woolfs gradually ceased being their own printers.7
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pattern. the Woolfs moved their city residence from the suburbs back to Bloomsbury. so that “the sane and the insane” would exist “side by side. a Mr. Soon the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West began to court Woolf. Smith. At the end of the day.” Her aim was to “tunnel” into these two characters until Clarissa Dalloway’s afﬁrmations meet Septimus Smith’s negations.

To the Lighthouse—published on May 5. ﬁnally. Woolf sought to reclaim Sackville-West through a “biography” that would include Sackville family history. he then becomes female. the 32nd anniversary of Julia Stephen’s death—evoked her childhood summers. pubimitation of biographilished by the Hogarth Press in 1927. historical. Woolf herself Bell for the ﬁrst edition of Virginia writes in mock-heroic Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse.7 Virginia Woolf
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with news of the death. Their relationship having cooled by 1927. and personal dilemmas with the story of Orlando.J. She solved biographical. who lives from Elizabethan times through the entire 18th century. As a novel. by Clarissa’s intuiting why Septimus threw his life away. N. it broke narrative continuity into a tripartite structure and thereby melded into its structure questions about creativity and the nature and function of art. and lives into the 20th Dust jacket designed by V anessa century. Merchantville. over the same period of
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. 1927. The main characters are connected by motifs and. cal styles that change Between the Covers Rare Books. experiences debilitating gender constraints. Dalloway by merging the novelistic and elegiac forms. As an elegy. Woolf wished to build on her achievement in Mrs.

was daunting. Woolf studied the history of women’s education and employment and argued that unequal opportunities for women negatively affect all of society. Through To the Lighthouse and The W aves. Having praised a 1930 exhibit of Vanessa Bell’s paintings for their wordlessness. The discrimination against women that Woolf had discussed in A Room of One’s Own and Professions for Women inspired her to plan a book that would trace the story of a ﬁctional family named Pargiter and explain the social conditions affecting family members over a period of time. and the oppression of women. she began compiling a scrapbook of clippings illustrating the horrors of war. Afterward she was increasingly angered by masculine condescension to female talent. For her 1931 talk Professions for Women. the threat of fascism. In A Room of One’s Own (1929).
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. poetic interludes describe the sea and sky from dawn to dusk. The task of doing so. Woolf became. In The W aves (1931). Thus. The W aves offers a six-sided shape that illustrates how each individual experiences events uniquely.
Late Work
Even before ﬁnishing The W aves.7
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time. In 1921 John Maynard Keynes had told Woolf that one of her memoirs represented her best writing. Woolf blamed women’s absence from history not on their lack of brains and talent but on their poverty. one of the three major English-language Modernist experimenters in stream-of-consciousness writing. Orlando: A Biography (1928) exposes the artiﬁciality of both gender and genre prescriptions. In The Pargiters: A Novel-Essay she would alternate between sections of ﬁction and of fact. Woolf planned a mystical novel that would be similarly impersonal and abstract. with James Joyce and William Faulkner. however.

—d. put stones in her pockets. Dublin.7 Virginia Woolf
7
Woolf took a holiday from The Pargiters to write a mock biography of Flush. Between the Acts was published posthumously later that year.)
methods in such large works of ﬁction as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans W (1939). She narrated 50 years of family history through the decline of class and patriarchal systems. Woolf ’s chief anodyne against Adolf Hitler. 2. Flush (1933) remains both a biographical satire and a lighthearted exploration of perception. Woolf worried that this novel was “too slight” and indeed that all writing was irrelevant when England seemed on the verge of invasion and civilization about to slide over a precipice. and the threat of another war. the dog of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In her novel. a depressed Woolf found herself unable to write. she walked behind Monk’s House and down to the River Ouse. 13. the rise of feminism. But she feared she would never ﬁnish The Pargiters. On March 28. During the bombing of London in 1940 and 1941. 1941. and drowned herself. she worked on Between the Acts. The Years (1937) became a best-seller. and her own despair was writing. in this case a dog’s. 1941. She solved this dilemma by jettisoning the essay sections. 1882. Facing such horrors. Though (or perhaps because) Woolf ’s trimming muted the book’s radicalism. ake
was an Irish novelist noted for his experiJ ames Joyce of language and exploration of new literary mental use
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. Ire. and renaming her book The Years. Jan. Feb. keeping the family narrative. war threatens art and humanity itself. Despite Between the Acts’ afﬁrmation of the value of art. Zürich. Switz. World War II.
JAMES JOYCE
(b.

the day that he chose as what is known as “Bloomsday” (the day of his novel Ulysses). Meanwhile Joyce had met a girl named Nora Barnacle. Three stories. The Irish Homestead. Eventually he persuaded her to leave Ireland with him. after attending a few lectures in Dublin.A. which was then staffed by Jesuit priests. he borrowed what money he could and went to Paris. and teachers that the resolution was justiﬁed. on principle. with whom he fell in love on June 16. he decided to become a doctor.7
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Joyce was educated at University College. There he studied languages and reserved his energies for extracurricular activities. Stephen Hero. In 1905 they moved to Trieste. but. Eveline. friends. reading widely—particularly in books not recommended by the Jesuits—and taking an active part in the college’s Literary and Historical Society. Joyce obtained a position in the Berlitz School. Pola. where he abandoned the idea of medical studies. in 1902. He received a B. and After the Race. working in his spare time at his novel and short stories. Joyce and Barnacle left Dublin together in October 1904. and studied in the SainteGeneviève Library. By 1903 he had begun writing a lengthy naturalistic novel. To support himself while writing. when in 1904 George Russell offered £1 each for some simple short stories with an Irish background to appear in a farmers’ magazine. based on the events of his own life. wrote some book reviews. Dublin. had appeared under the pseudonym Stephen Dedalus before the editor decided that Joyce’s work was not suitable for his readers. Austria-Hungary. although he refused. Early success in publishing a theatre review conﬁrmed Joyce in his resolution to become a writer and persuaded his family. to go through a ceremony of marriage. In response Joyce began writing the stories published as Dubliners (1914). In
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. The Sisters.

Encouraged by the acclaim given to this. having the sheets printed in the United States. and cataracts. Her generosity resulted partly from her admiration for his work and partly from her sympathy with his difﬁculties. From February 1917 until 1930 he endured a series of 25 operations for iritis. editor of the Egoist magazine. An autobiographical novel. some of his most joyful passages being composed when his health was at its worst. the American Little Review began to publish episodes from Ulysses.000. sometimes being for short intervals totally blind.
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. He was helped by a large grant from Edith Rockefeller McCormick and ﬁnally by a series of grants from Harriet Shaw Weaver. Weaver published it herself. he worked at a bank in Rome. glaucoma. Despite this he kept up his spirits and continued working. he had to contend with eye diseases that never really left him. Unable to ﬁnd an English printer willing to set up A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for book publication. for. Joyce’s ﬁnancial difﬁculties were great. disliking almost everything he saw.7
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1906–07. in March 1918. continuing until the work was banned in December 1920. After the outbreak of World War I. which by 1930 had amounted to more than £23. He decided that Stephen Hero lacked artistic control and form and rewrote it as “a work in ﬁve chapters” under a title—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—intended to direct attention to its focus upon the central ﬁgure. where it was also published in 1916. for eight months. as well as poverty. A Portrait of the Artist traces the intellectual and emotional development of a young man named Stephen Dedalus and ends with his decision to leave Dublin for Paris to devote his life to art. His studies in European literature had interested him in both the Symbolists and the Realists. his work began to show a synthesis of these two rival movements.

Joyce suffered great and prolonged anxiety over his daughter’s mental health. where they were married. 2. The three central characters—Stephen Dedalus (the hero of Joyce’s earlier Portrait of the Artist). Joyce returned for a few months to Trieste. Ulysses is constructed as a modern parallel to Homer’s Odyssey. it became immediately famous upon publication. at the invitation of Ezra Pound. By the use of interior monologue Joyce reveals the innermost thoughts and feelings of these characters as they live hour by hour. near Dublin. All of the action of the novel takes place in Dublin on a single day (June 16. and then. the story of a publican in Chapelizod. his wife. and brothel. maternity hospital. Humphrey Chimpden
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. his scruples on this point having yielded to his daughter’s complaints. and their three children. passing from a public bath to a funeral. Ulysses. In addition to his chronic eye troubles. and Penelope. proprietor of a bookshop called Shakespeare and Company. Basically the book is. 1904). What had seemed her slight eccentricity grew into unmistakable and sometimes violent mental disorder that Joyce tried by every possible means to cure. 1922. Leopold Bloom. often a passage was revised more than a dozen times before he was satisﬁed. library. and his wife. Already well known because of the censorship troubles. by Sylvia Beach. but it became necessary ﬁnally to place her in a mental hospital near Paris. the title of which was kept secret. a Jewish advertising canvasser. the novel being known simply as “Work in Progress” until it was published in its entirety in May 1939. His novel Ulysses was published there on Feb. in one sense. Meanwhile he wrote and rewrote sections of Finnegans W ake. In 1931 he and Barnacle visited London. In Paris Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake.7
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After World War I. but Mr. Molly Bloom— are intended to be modern counterparts of Telemachus. he went to Paris in July 1920.

Anna Livia Plurabelle.” Characters from literature and history appear and merge and disappear as “the intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators” dream on. and Isabel are every family of mankind. remembering his father. Languages merge: Anna Livia has “vlossyhair”—włosy being Polish for “hair”. an exacting high school for the academic elite. Kevin. the archetypal family about whom all humanity is dreaming. Austria)
F
ranz Kafka was a German-language writer of visionary ﬁction. Prague. defending his theories. “a bad of wind” blows. Jerry. HCE. and obedient child who did well in elementary school and in the Altstädter Staatsgymnasium. bâd being Turkish for “wind. he rebelled against the
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. whose posthumously published novels— especially Der Prozess (1925. near Vienna. Joyce took his family back to Zürich. Mrs. The Castle)—express the anxieties and alienation of 20thcentury humankind. joking. one form of which is “Here Comes Everybody”).7 James Joyce
7
Earwicker (often designated by variations on his initials. The son of an assimilated Jew who held only perfunctorily to the religious practices and social formalities of the Jewish community. Bohemia. After the fall of France in World War II (1940). It is thousands of dreams in one. July 3. June 3. The Trial) and Das Schloss (1926. enjoying himself. where he died.
FRANZ KAFKA
(b. however. still disappointed with the reception given to his last book. And throughout the book Joyce himself is present. Kierling. He was a timid. 1883. Kafka was German both in language and culture. He was respected and liked by his teachers. mocking his critics. Austria-Hungary [now in Czech Republic]—d. Inwardly. guilt-ridden. 1924.

The two men became acquainted while Kafka was studying law at the University of Prague. Kafka’s opposition to established society became apparent when. and interpreter of Kafka’s writings and as his most inﬂuential biographer. as a modern intellectual. Even then he was essentially passive and politically unengaged.7
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authoritarian institution and the dehumanized humanistic curriculum. however. however. with its emphasis on rote learning and classical languages. he declared himself a socialist as well as an atheist. He was sympathetic to Czech political and cultural aspirations. did not permit Kafka to devote himself to writing. saviour. and in 1907 he took up regular employment with an insurance company. and in 1902 he met Max Brod. and in his later years he showed marked interest and sympathy for a socialized Zionism. but his identiﬁcation with German culture kept even these sympathies subdued. when tuberculosis forced him to take intermittent sick leaves and. as an adolescent. There he remained until 1917. The long hours and exacting requirements of the Assicurazioni Generali. Kafka did. this minor literary artist became the most intimate and solicitous of Kafka’s friends. In 1908 he found in Prague a job in the seminationalized Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. he was also alienated from his own Jewish heritage. about two years before
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. to retire (with a pension) in 1922. Kafka was isolated from the German community in Prague. he attended meetings of the Czech Anarchists (before World War I). but. He received his doctorate in 1906. and eventually he emerged as the promoter. As a Jew. Thus. become friendly with some German-Jewish intellectuals and literati in Prague. Throughout his adult life he expressed qualiﬁed sympathies for the socialists. social isolation and rootlessness contributed to Kafka’s lifelong personal unhappiness. ﬁnally.

These publications include. misgivings about his work caused Kafka before his death to request that all of his unpublished manuscripts
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. and he was esteemed and liked by all who worked with him. works representative of Kafka’s maturity as an artist—The Judgment. among others. Metamorphosis) and In der Strafkolonie (1919. Generally speaking. where Dymant joined him. In fact. Kafka was a charming. he met Dora Dymant (Diamant). a young Jewish socialist. In his job he was considered tireless and ambitious.7
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he died. but he found his routine ofﬁce job and the exhausting double life into which it forced him (for his nights were frequently consumed in writing) to be excruciating torture. Die Verwandlung (1915. After a brief ﬁnal stay in Prague. Ein Landarzt (1919. In 1917 he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis. he soon became the right hand of his boss. A Country Doctor). In the Penal Colony). and from then onward he spent frequent periods in sanatoriums. he died of tuberculosis in a clinic near Vienna. Sought out by leading avant-garde publishers. two further long stories. and a collection of short prose. His health was poor and ofﬁce work exhausted him. The couple lived in Berlin until Kafka’s health signiﬁcantly worsened during the spring of 1924. four stories exhibiting the concision and lucidity characteristic of Kafka’s late style. had been prepared by the author but did not appear until after his death. intelligent. a long story written in 1912. In 1923 Kafka went to Berlin to devote himself to writing. Kafka reluctantly published a few of his writings during his lifetime. and his deeper personal relationships were neurotically disturbed. and humorous individual. Ein Hungerkünstler (1924. A Hunger Artist). The conﬂicting inclinations of his complex and ambivalent personality found expression in his sexual relationships. During a vacation on the Baltic coast later that year.

respectively. not only because of his family’s shame and its neglect of him but because of his own guilty despair. his literary executor. Many of the motifs in the short fables also recur in the novels. though occasionally the strangeness may be understood as the outcome of a literary or verbal device. the inhumanity of the powerful and their agents. Some
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. Many of the tales are even more unfathomable. in 1931. 1926. In the Penal Colony presents an ofﬁcer who demonstrates his devotion to duty by submitting himself to the appalling (and clinically described) mutilations of his own instrument of torture. Brod and Kafka’s foremost English translators.7
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be destroyed. the violence and barbarity that lurk beneath normal routine. Max Brod. Kafka’s stories and novels have provoked a wealth of interpretations. others have emphasized the social criticism. and Amerika in 1925. Some have seen his neurotic involvement with his father as the heart of his work. the ambiguity of a task’s value and the horror of devotion to it—one of Kafka’s constant preoccupations—appears again in A Hunger Artist. as when the delusions of a pathological state are given the status of reality or when the metaphor of a common ﬁgure of speech is taken literally. bafﬂing mixture of the normal and the fantastic. and a collection of shorter pieces. Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer (The Great W of China). disregarded his instructions. The Castle. Brod published the novels The Trial. all Many of Kafka’s fables contain an inscrutable. viewed the novels as allegories of divine grace. Willa and Edwin Muir. and 1927. he slowly dies. In The Metamorphosis the son wakes up to ﬁnd himself transformed into a monstrous and repulsive insect. Thus in The Judgment a son unquestioningly commits suicide at the behest of his aged father. Existentialists have seen Kafka’s environment of guilt and despair as the ground upon which to construct an authentic existence. This theme.

playwright. Sept. 1965. London. and editor who was a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). dramatist. literary critic. style. His ﬁrst important publication.A. 4. Jan. a dissertation entitled Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. There is evidence in both the works and the diaries for each of these interpretations. attending Henri Bergson’s lectures in philosophy at the Sorbonne and reading poetry with Alain-Fournier. Bradley. Eliot entered Harvard in 1906 and received a B. His experiments in diction. was The Love Song of J. Louis. and the ﬁrst masterpiece of “Modernism” in English. It represented a break with the immediate past as radical as that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads (1798). U. From the appearance of Eliot’s ﬁrst
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.S. From 1911 to 1914 he was back at Harvard reading Indian philosophy and studying Sanskrit. literary critic. Alfred Prufrock. Eng. 1888. But World War I had intervened. Mo.
T.H. and in a series of critical essays he shattered old orthodoxies and erected new ones. and he never returned to Harvard to take the ﬁnal oral examination for the Ph. 26. and philosophical poet. in Europe.)
homas Sterns Eliot was an American-English poet.. St. but Kafka’s work as a whole transcends them all. in 1909. ELIOT
(b.—d. In 1948 he was awarded both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Eliot was to pursue four careers: editor.D. He spent the year 1910–11 in France. and versiﬁcation revitalized English poetry. degree. S. By 1916 he had ﬁnished.7
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have found an imaginative anticipation of totalitarianism in the random and faceless bureaucratic terror of The Trial.

The poet writing in English may therefore make his own tradition by using materials from any past period. Consciously intended or not.7
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volume. Prufrock and Other Observations. is not a mere repetition of the work of the immediate past. Two other essays almost complete the Eliot critical canon: The Metaphysical Poets and Andrew Marvell. In a series of vignettes. In 1919 he published Poems. in any language. a meditative interior monologue in blank verse: nothing like this poem had appeared in English. one may conveniently date the maturity of the 20th-century poetic revolution. Eliot’s criticism created an atmosphere in which his own poetry could be better understood and appreciated than if it had to appear in a literary milieu dominated by the standards of the preceding age. and of human beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption. in 1917 he began his brief career as a bank clerk in Lloyds Bank Ltd. For a year Eliot taught French and Latin at the Highgate School. a metrist of great virtuosity. as used by the poet. it portrays a sterile world of panicky fears and barren lusts. rather. it comprises the whole of European literature from Homer to the present. Eliot asserts that tradition. in addition. Eliot won an international reputation. in 1917. published
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. which contained the poem Gerontion. The W Land aste expresses with great power the disenchantment. appearing in his ﬁrst critical volume. The Waste Land showed him to be. and disgust of the period after World War I. capable of astonishing modulations ranging from the sublime to the conversational. In the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. The Sacred Wood (1920). With the publication in 1922 of his poem The W aste Land. disillusionment. Meanwhile he was also a proliﬁc reviewer and essayist in both literary criticism and technical philosophy. loosely linked by the legend of the search for the Grail.

and meditative style than his earlier works. This work made a deep impression on the reading public. putting at the top Donne and other Metaphysical poets of the 17th century and lowering poets of the 18th and 19th centuries. the originality of the form he had devised.7
T. inferior to the lyric and meditative poetry. the former a tragedy of revenge. and even those who were unable to accept the poems’ Christian beliefs recognized the intellectual integrity with which Eliot pursued his high theme. 1917–32 (1932). a religious meditation in a style entirely different from that of any of the earlier poems. which begin with Sweeney Agonistes (published 1926. This work led to the award to Eliot. The ﬁrst long poem after his conversion was Ash Wednesday (1930). Eliot
7
in Selected Essays. ﬁrst performed in 1934) and end with The Elder Statesman (ﬁrst performed 1958. Eliot’s career as editor was ancillary to his main interests. After World War II. and the technical mastery of his verse. Eliot’s plays. Eliot returned to writing plays with several comedies derived from Greek drama. The Family Reunion (1939) and Murder in the Cathedral are Christian tragedies.S. the latter of the sin of pride. of the Nobel Prize for Literature. with the exception of Murder in the Cathedral (published and performed 1935). In these essays he effects a new historical perspective on the hierarchy of English poetry. in that year he also became a British subject. thus he brought “poetic drama” back to the popular stage. This and subsequent poems were written in a more relaxed. are. Eliot was conﬁrmed in the Church of England (1927). All his plays are in a blank verse of his own invention. musical. which was issued as a book in 1943. published 1959). Eliot’s masterpiece is Four Quartets. but his
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. in 1948. Murder in the Cathedral is a modern miracle play on the martyrdom of Thomas Becket.

. 1953.)
E
ugene O’Neill was a foremost American dramatist of the 20th century and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. on trains. Oct.
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. submerged himself in alcohol. The Criterion (1922–39). lived a derelict’s existence on the waterfronts of Buenos Aires. From the 1920s onward. and attempted suicide. N. and backstage. who was born in a hotel and whose father was a touring actor. was the most distinguished international critical journal of the period. U. and New York City. his elitist cultural and social views.” He shipped to sea. Since his death. of the publishing ﬁrm of Faber & Faber Ltd. Boston. Liverpool. and he attended Princeton University for one year (1906–07). he held a job for a few months as a reporter and contributor to the poetry column of the New London Telegraph but soon came down with tuberculosis. after which he left school to begin what he later regarded as his real education in “life experience. for six months (1912–13).—d. Conn. Eliot’s inﬂuence as a poet and as a critic—in both Great Britain and the United States— was immense..S. focusing on his complex relationship to his American origins. Nov. and his exclusivist notions of tradition and of race. 16. 1888. Recovering brieﬂy at the age of 24. New York. He was a “director. O’Neill. He was educated at boarding schools. 27.” He began to write plays.” or working editor. he confronted himself soberly and nakedly for the ﬁrst time and seized the chance for what he later called his “rebirth. spent his early childhood in hotel rooms.
EUGENE O’NEILL
(b. from the early 1920s until his death. Mass. Conﬁned to the Gaylord Farm Sanitarium in Wallingford.7
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quarterly review.Y. interpreters have been markedly more critical.

O’Neill’s capacity for and commitment to work were staggering. Although he was only one of several writers whose plays were produced by the Playwrights’ Theater. Beyond the Horizon impressed the critics with its tragic realism. after Shakespeare and Shaw. which were written between 1913 and 1917 and produced in 1924 under the overall title S. The talent inherent in the play was immediately evident to the group. 1916. By the time his ﬁrst full-length play. at the Morosco Theater. Feb. on Nov. In the Zone. in the quiet ﬁshing village of Provincetown. Glencairn. The Emperor Jones (1920. Bound East for Cardiff. O’Neill became the most widely translated and produced dramatist. about the disintegration of a Pullman porter turned tropical279
. Beyond the Horizon. Between 1920 and 1943 he completed 20 long plays—several of them double and triple length—and a number of shorter ones. was produced on Broadway. where a group of young writers and painters had launched an experimental theatre. His most-distinguished short plays include the four early sea plays. which that fall formed the Playwrights’ Theater in Greenwich Village. the young playwright already had a small reputation. The Long Voyage Home.. Mass. and Long Day’s Journey into Night—and brought him to the attention of a wider theatre public. both in the United States and abroad. won for O’Neill the ﬁrst of four Pulitzer prizes in drama—others were for Anna Christie. 2. they produced his one-act sea play Bound East for Cardiff. Their ﬁrst bill. his contribution within the next few years made the group’s reputation. Strange Interlude. In their tiny. 1920. He wrote and rewrote many of his manuscripts half a dozen times before he was satisﬁed. and The Moon of the Caribbees. 3. included Bound East for Cardiff—O’Neill’s New York debut. ramshackle playhouse on a wharf. For the next 20 years his reputation grew steadily.S.7 Eugene O’Neill
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O’Neill’s first appearance as a playwright came in the summer of 1916.

The Great God Brown (1926). Through his efforts. June 11 [June 23. and The Iceman Cometh (1946) are among his important long plays. Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). a nurse. Akhmatova began writing verse at age 11 and at 21 joined a group of St. his older brother. Russia. seeing no one except his doctor. about the disintegration of a displaced steamship coal stoker). and The Hairy Ape (1922. the American theatre grew up during the 1920s. who loved and corrupted him and died of alcoholism in middle age. caught and torn between love for and rage at all three. O’Neill died as broken and tragic a ﬁgure as any he had created for the stage. March 5. Ukraine. near Moscow. To
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. developing into a cultural medium that could take its place with the best in American ﬁction. O’Neill’s plays were written from an intensely personal point of view. Desire Under the Elms (1924). He was the ﬁrst American dramatist to regard the stage as a literary medium and the only American playwright ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Ah.)
he Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (the pseudonym of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko) was recognized at her death as the greatest woman poet in Russian literature.
ANNA AKHMATOVA
(b.7
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island dictator). Petersburg poets. near Odessa. Wilderness! (1933) was his only comedy. Strange Interlude (1928). and his third wife. and music.R.S. O’Neill’s ﬁnal years were spent in grim frustration. Russian Empire—d. he longed for his death and sat waiting for it in a Boston hotel. U. Unable to work. and O’Neill himself.S. Domodedovo. the Acmeists. who loved and tormented each other. deriving directly from the scarring effects of his family’s tragic relationships—his mother and father. 1966. 1889. New Style]. Bolshoy Fontan. painting.

she added to her main theme some civic. Vecher (1912. fully in control of the subtle verbal and gestural vocabulary of modern intimacies and romance. Her ﬁrst collections. brought her fame and made her poetic voice emblematic of the experience of her generation.7 Anna Akhmatova
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Though her work often angered Communist Party ofﬁcials in the former Soviet Union. especially the latter.
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. “Rosary”). During World War I and following the Revolution of 1917. “Evening”) and Chyotki (1914. patriotic. Anna Akhmatova’s poetry served as an inspiration to many. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
their program of concrete representation and precise form and meaning Akhmatova added her own stamp of elegant colloquialism and the psychological sophistication of a young cosmopolitan woman.

Uzbekistan. and no volume of her poetry appeared in the Soviet Union until 1940. did not prevent the communist cultural watchdogs from proclaiming her “bourgeois and aristocratic” and condemning her poetry for its narrow preoccupation with love and God. and none of her work appeared in print for three years. a number of her poems eulogizing Stalin and Soviet communism were printed in several issues of the illustrated weekly magazine Ogonyok (“The Little Light”) under the title Iz tsikla “Slava miru” (“From the Cycle ‘Glory to Peace’”). was destroyed. and political indifference. In 1923 she entered a period of almost complete poetic silence and literary ostracism. The broadening of her thematic range. She gave poetic readings. and Anno Domini MCMXXI (1921). This uncharacteristic capitulation to the Soviet dictator was motivated by Akhmatova’s
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. In August 1946. already in print. however. however. she was harshly denounced by the Central Committee of the Communist Party for her “eroticism. Evacuated to Tashkent. soon thereafter. Her artistry and increasing control of her medium were particularly prominent in her next collections: Belaya staya (1917. mysticism. Then. and plans were made for publication of a large edition of her works.” She was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers.7
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and religious motifs but did not sacriﬁce her personal intensity or artistic conscience. In September 1941. “The White Flock”). Akhmatova was permitted to deliver an inspiring radio address to the women of Leningrad (St. in 1950. she read her poems to hospitalized soldiers and published a number of war-inspired poems. Podorozhnik (1921. a small volume of selected poetry appeared in Tashkent in 1943. Petersburg). “Plantain”). At the end of the war she returned to Leningrad. following the German invasion. where her poems began to appear in local magazines and newspapers. an unreleased book of her poems.

is a powerful lyric summation of Akhmatova’s philosophy and her own deﬁnitive statement on the meaning of her life and poetic achievement. 1897. composed between 1935 and 1940 and occasioned by Akhmatova’s grief over an earlier arrest and imprisonment of her son in 1938. Her journeys to Sicily and England to receive these honours were her ﬁrst travel outside her homeland since 1912.S. U.)
W
illiam Faulkner was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. 25. Miss. an international poetry prize awarded in Italy. Petersburg bohemia in pre– World War I years is “double-exposed” onto the tragedies and suffering of the post-1917 decades. and in 1965 she received an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Oxford. In 1964 she was awarded the Etna-Taormina prize.
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. on which she worked from 1940 to 1962. 1962. Rekviem (“Requiem”).7 Anna Akhmatova
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desire to propitiate Stalin and win the freedom of her son. Poema bez geroya (“Poem Without a Hero”). who had been arrested in 1949 and exiled to Siberia. This masterpiece—a poetic monument to the sufferings of the Soviet people during Stalin’s terror—was published in Russia for the ﬁrst time in 1989. Sept. Miss. July 6. in which the life of St. was not published in the Soviet Union until 1976. Byhalia. Akhmatova’s longest work and perhaps her masterpiece. New Albany.. The tone of these poems (those glorifying Stalin were omitted from Soviet editions of Akhmatova’s works published after his death) is far different from the moving and universalized lyrical cycle. This difﬁcult and complex work.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
(b.—d.

leisurely novel.. stylistically ambitious and strongly evocative of the sense of alienation experienced by soldiers returning from World War I to a civilian world of which they seemed no longer a part. 1973). After returning home.7
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A reluctant student. although the November 1918 armistice intervened before he could ﬁnish ground school. without graduating but devoted himself to “undirected reading. Faulkner left high school in Oxford. that he had conﬁdently counted upon to establish his reputation and career. His ﬁrst novel. he enrolled for a few university courses. and he was especially shaken by his difﬁculty in ﬁnding a publisher for Flags in the Dust (published posthumously. Faulkner joined the British Royal Air Force (RAF) as a cadet pilot under training in Canada. it created in print for the ﬁrst time that densely imagined world of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County—based partly on Ripley but chieﬂy on Oxford and Lafayette county and characterized by frequent recurrences of the same characters. however. as Sartoris in 1929. None of his short stories was accepted. and themes—which Faulkner was to use as the setting for so many subsequent novels and stories. a long. given a Southern though not a Mississippian setting. let alone ﬂy or reach Europe. and acted out a selfdramatizing role as a poet who had seen wartime service.” In July 1918. Miss. severely truncated. Soldiers’ Pay (1926). Back in Oxford—with occasional visits to Pascagoula on the Gulf Coast—Faulkner again worked at a series of temporary jobs but was chieﬂy concerned with proving himself as a professional writer. places. published poems and drawings in campus newspapers. drawing extensively on local observation and his own family history. was an impressive achievement. impelled by dreams of martial glory and by despair at a broken love affair. When the novel eventually did appear.
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.

an anthology skillfully edited by Malcolm Cowley in accordance with the arresting if questionable thesis that Faulkner was deliberately constructing a historically based “legend” of the South. conﬂictingly. but Faulkner’s American reputation—which had always lagged well behind his reputation in Europe—was boosted by The Portable Faulkner (1946). Absalom. it is the most systematically multi-voiced of Faulkner’s novels and marks the culmination of his early post-Joycean experimentalism. Other novels followed in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
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. focused above all on the processes of its own telling. and moves toward a powerful yet essentially unresolved conclusion. Entirely narrated by the various Bundrens and people encountered on their journey. Quentin the disturbed Harvard undergraduate. he combined a Yoknapatawpha setting with radical technical experimentation. in its inﬁnite open-endedness. A fourth section. provides new perspectives on some of the central characters. narrated as if authorially. including Dilsey. as Faulkner’s supreme “modernist” ﬁction.7 William Faulkner
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In The Sound and the Fury (1929). Because this profoundly Southern story is constructed— speculatively. his ﬁrst major novel. and inconclusively—by a series of narrators with sharply divergent self-interested perspectives. Absalom! (1936) was Faulkner’s next major novel. the Compsons’ black servant. Faulkner’s next novel. the brilliant tragicomedy called As I Lay Dying (1930). and Jason the embittered local businessman—expose their differing obsessions with their sister and their loveless relationships with their parents. In successive “stream-of-consciousness” monologues the three brothers of Candace (Caddy) Compson—Benjy the idiot. Absalom. Absalom! is often seen. is centred upon the conﬂicts within the “poor white” Bundren family as it makes its slow and difﬁcult way to Jefferson to bury its matriarch’s malodorously decaying corpse.

Switz. The quality of Faulkner’s writing is often said to have declined in the wake of the Nobel Prize. his health undermined by his drinking and by too many falls from horses too big for him. 1977. and later in 1950 the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature catapulted the author instantly to the peak of world fame and enabled him to afﬁrm.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
(b. State Department. St. drinking heavily at times and indulging in a number of extramarital affairs—his opportunities in these directions being considerably enhanced by several overseas trips (most notably to Japan in 1955) undertaken on behalf of the U. and in the importance of the artist to that survival. April 22. even in an atomic age. He died of a heart attack in July 1962. Petersburg. Montreux. The Nobel Prize had a major impact on Faulkner’s private life.)
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ladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a Russian-born American novelist and critic.7
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Faulkner’s Collected Stories (1950). and also became politically active at home. the foremost of the
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. in a famous acceptance speech. He took his “ambassadorial” duties seriously. taking positions on major racial issues in the vain hope of ﬁnding middle ground between entrenched Southern conservatives and interventionist Northern liberals. he became less consistently “driven” as a writer than in earlier years and allowed himself more personal freedom. Russia—d. July 2. was also well received. 1899. Conﬁdent now of his reputation and future sales. although Requiem for a Nun (1951) and A Fable (1954) suggest otherwise. his belief in the survival of the human race. impressive in both quantity and quality.S. at the age of 64. speaking frequently in public and to interviewers.

Nabokov lived in Germany and France. He wrote in both Russian and English. King. During his years of European emigration. He and his family eventually made their way to England. Cambridge. and two collections of his Russian poetry. he graduated with ﬁrst-class honours in 1922. the autobiographical Mashenka (Mary). His ﬁrst novel. and his best works. His ﬁrst two novels had German translations. Between 1922 and 1940. marked his turn to a highly stylized form that characterized his art thereafter. But until his best-seller Lolita. including Lolita (1955). mainly in Russian but also in English. Poems (1916) and Two Paths (1918). before leaving Russia in 1919.7
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post-1917 émigré authors. Knave. his second novel. and the money he obtained for them he used for butterﬂy-hunting expeditions (he eventually published 18 scientiﬁc papers on entomology). Nabokov was born into an old aristocratic family. appeared in 1923. after the family had settled in Berlin. intricate literary effects. on a scholarship provided for the sons of prominent Russians in exile. Nabokov’s father was assassinated by a reactionary rightist while shielding another man at a public meeting. which appeared in 1928. By 1925 he settled upon prose as his main genre. Queen. and he attended Trinity College. Nabokov published two collections of verse. Nabokov lived in a state of happy and continual semipenury. The Cluster and The Empyrean Path. feature stylish. While at Cambridge he ﬁrst studied zoology but soon switched to French and Russian literature. His ﬁrst short story had already been published in Berlin in 1924. appeared in 1926. While still in England he continued to write poetry. During the period in
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. no book he wrote in Russian or English produced more than a few hundred dollars. In 1922. All of his Russian novels were published in very small editions in Berlin and Paris.

Nabokov’s major critical works are an irreverent book about Nikolay Gogol (1944) and a monumental four288
. who is possessed by an overpowering desire for very young girls. because the work is a medley of Russian. Pale Fire (1962). extends and completes Nabokov’s mastery of unorthodox structure. ﬁrst shown in The Gift and present also in Solus Rex. The same may be said of his plays.7
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which he wrote his ﬁrst eight novels. with its antihero. lechery. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1947). was a turning point. and English and from occasional walk-on parts in ﬁlms. a novel consisting of a long poem and a commentary on it by a mad literary pedant. Humbert Humbert. published in 1938. Sobytiye (“The Event”). is a parody of the family chronicle form. Dmitri) chose to live (from 1959) in genteelly shabby quarters in a Swiss hotel. however. Russian. The problem of art again appears in Nabokov’s best novel in Russian. it is his most difﬁcult work. Serious use of parody thereafter became a key device in Nabokov’s art. His ﬁrst novels in English. he made his living in Berlin and later in Paris by giving lessons in tennis. Ada (1969). French. The subject matter of Nabokov’s novels is principally the problem of art itself presented in various ﬁgurative disguises. The Gift. a Russian novel that began to appear serially in 1940 but was never completed. Nabokov’s 17th and longest novel. All of his earlier themes come into play in the novel. is yet another of Nabokov’s subtle allegories: love examined in the light of its seeming opposite. Even after great wealth came to him with the success of Lolita and the subsequent interest in his previous work. and English. Nabokov and his family (he and his wife had one son. do not rank with his best Russian work. and The Waltz Invention. and. This novel. Lolita (1955). with its reliance on literary parody. the story of a young artist’s development in the spectral world of post–World War I Berlin.

Speak On. 1961. after which he began work on a sequel.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
(b. ﬁnal version” of the autobiographical Speak.7 Vladimir Nabokov
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volume translation of. Memory. Hemingway entered World War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. concerning his European years. Memory. He was decorated for heroism. was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. Scott Fitzgerald. somewhat aloof style and unusual novelistic concerns were interpreted as snobbery by his detractors—although his best Russian critic. On July 8. What he called the “present. 1899. an American novelist and shortstory writer. Ezra Pound— he began to see his nonjournalistic work appear in print there. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and widely publicized life. Idaho)
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rnest Hemingway.. 1918. Advised and encouraged by other American writers in Paris—F. concerning the American years.S. As Nabokov’s reputation grew in the 1930s so did the ferocity of the attacks made upon him. Hemingway sailed for France as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. Cicero [now in Oak Park]. Ill. a collection of
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. His succinct and lucid prose style exerted a powerful inﬂuence on American and British ﬁction in the 20th century. and commentary on. His idiosyncratic. U.—d. not yet 19 years old. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1964). insisted that Nabokov’s aristocratic view was appropriate to his subject matters: problems of art masked by allegory. July 2. Vladislav Khodasevich. Gertrude Stein. he was injured on the Austro-Italian front at Fossalta di Piave. After recuperating at home. and in 1925 his ﬁrst important book. Ketchum. was published in 1967. July 21.

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The sparse yet pointed style of writing evidenced in Ernest Hemingway’s novels may have been a holdover from the author’s days as a journalist and war correspondent. Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images 290
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a novel with which he scored his ﬁrst solid success. The harvest of Hemingway’s considerable experience of Spain in war and peace was the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). It was also the most successful of all his books as measured in sales. and hunting that by then had become part of his life and formed the background for much of his writing. In 1926 he published The Sun Also Rises. an American volunteer who
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. but he traveled widely for the skiing. Hemingway developed a grim but lyrical novel of great power. At least in the public view. Reaching back to his experience as a young soldier in Italy. it tells of Robert Jordan. Hemingway made four trips there. however.7 Ernest Hemingway
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stories called In Our Time. Hemingway’s love of Spain and his passion for bullﬁghting resulted in Death in the Afternoon (1932). it was originally released in Paris in 1924. His position as a master of short ﬁction had been advanced by Men Without Women in 1927 and thoroughly established with the stories in Winner Take Nothing in 1933. fusing love story with war story. Still deeply attached to that country. The writing of books occupied Hemingway for most of the postwar years. a substantial and impressive work that some critics consider his ﬁnest novel. bullﬁghting. By now Spain was in the midst of civil war. the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) overshadowed such works. Set during the Spanish Civil War. was published in New York City. once more a correspondent. He also raised money for the Republicans in their struggle against the Nationalists under General Francisco Franco. a learned study of a spectacle he saw more as tragic ceremony than as sport. A minor novel of 1937 called To Have and Have Not is about a Caribbean desperado and is set against a background of lower-class violence and upper-class decadence in Key West during the Great Depression. ﬁshing. He remained based in Paris.

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is sent to join a guerrilla band behind the Nationalist lines in the Guadarrama Mountains. Following World War II in Europe. he took his life with a shotgun. and tried to lead his life and do his work as before. Idaho. a short heroic novel about an old Cuban ﬁsherman who. he received the Pulitzer Prize in ﬁction for The Old Man and the Sea (1952). The resulting terse. concentrated prose is concrete and unemotional yet is often resonant and capable of conveying great irony through understatement. hooks and boats a giant marlin only to have it eaten by voracious sharks during the long voyage home. Two days after his return to the house in Ketchum. Through dialogue.
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. He settled in Ketchum. Hemingway hit upon the device of describing a series of actions by using short. but. Hemingway offers telling and vivid proﬁles of the Spanish character and unsparingly depicts the cruelty and inhumanity stirred up by the civil war. In striving to be as objective and honest as possible. For a while he succeeded. after an extended struggle. Soon after (in 1953). which he experienced ﬁrsthand as a journalist. he was twice hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. Minnesota. Hemingway returned to his home in Cuba and began to work seriously again. simple sentences from which all comment or emotional rhetoric has been eliminated. where he received electroshock treatments. Hemingway’s prose style was probably the most widely imitated of any in the 20th century. and. was enthusiastically praised. ﬂashbacks. By 1960 Fidel Castro’s revolution had driven Hemingway from Cuba. on a trip to Africa. he was injured in a plane crash. He also traveled widely. anxiety-ridden and depressed. This book. which played a role in gaining for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. and stories.

20. The Grapes of Wrath won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award and was made into a notable ﬁlm in 1940. complex bond between two migrant labourers. which also appeared in play and ﬁlm versions. which later was the setting of some of his ﬁction. a classic account of a strike by agricultural labourers and a pair of Marxist labour organizers who engineer it. and his experiences lent authenticity to his depictions of the lives of the workers in his stories. New Y ork. he spent considerable time supporting himself as a manual labourer while writing. He ﬁrst achieved popularity with Tortilla Flat (1935). The novel is about the migration of a dispossessed family from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California and describes their subsequent exploitation by a ruthless system of agricultural economics.)
he American novelist John Steinbeck is best known for The Grapes of Wrath (1939). 1902. The novella Of Mice and Men (1937). 1968. Calif. 27. which summed up the bitterness of the Great Depression decade and aroused widespread sympathy for the plight of migratory farm workers. but did not take a degree. In Dubious Battle (1936). N. none of which were successful. Steinbeck attended Stanford University in California intermittently between 1920 and 1926. U. A protest novel punctuated by prose-poem
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. Before his books attained success. Cup of Gold (1929).—d.. Calif. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1962. The mood of gentle humour turned to one of unrelenting grimness in his next novel. an affectionately told story of Mexican-Americans.. was followed by The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933). He spent much of his life in Monterey County.7
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JOHN STEINBECK
(b. is a tragic story about the strange.Y.S. Steinbeck’s ﬁrst novel. Dec. Feb. Salinas.

and The Wayward Bus (1947)—contained the familiar elements of his social criticism but were more relaxed in approach and sentimental in tone. among them The Moon Is Down (1942). Steinbeck himself wrote the scripts for the ﬁlm versions of his stories The Pearl (1948) and The Red Pony (1949). It is in these works that his building of rich symbolic structures and his attempts at conveying mythopoeic and archetypal qualities in his characters are most effective.7
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interludes. His immediate postwar work—Cannery Row (1945). Steinbeck went to Mexico to collect marine life with the freelance biologist Edward F. and The Winter of Our Discontent (1961). Ricketts. East of Eden. a study of the fauna of the Gulf of California. during which they learn the necessity for collective action among the poor and downtrodden to prevent them from being destroyed individually. During World War II Steinbeck wrote some effective pieces of government propaganda. a novel of Norwegians under the Nazis.
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. Outstanding among the scripts he wrote directly for motion pictures were Forgotten Village (1941) and Viva Zapata! (1952). Steinbeck’s reputation rests mostly on the naturalistic novels with proletarian themes he wrote in the 1930s. The Grapes of Wrath tells of the Joad family’s almost biblical journey. was made into a ﬁlm in 1955. In critical opinion. Steinbeck’s later writings were comparatively slight works of entertainment and journalism interspersed with three conscientious attempts to reassert his stature as a major novelist: Burning Bright (1950). none equaled his earlier achievement. and the two men collaborated in writing Sea of Cortez (1941). The Pearl (1947). an ambitious epic about the moral relations between a California farmer and his two sons. He also served as a war correspondent. East of Eden (1952). After the best-selling success of The Grapes of Wrath.

he went into the East End of London to live in cheap lodging houses among labourers and beggars. Instead of accepting a scholarship to a university. into the class of sahibs. Orwell was born in Bengal. Bengal. and chose the latter. Motīhāri. London. Having felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste had prevented his mingling with the Burmese. Orwell decided to follow family tradition and. 1903. Donning ragged clothes. He spent a period in the slums of Paris and worked as a
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ric Arthur Blair. When he realized how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British. 21. He stayed from 1917 to 1921.7 George Orwell
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GEORGE ORWELL
(b. 1950. decided not to return to Burma. “Shooting an Elephant” and “A Hanging. his mother. Later he was to recount his experiences and his reactions to imperial rule in his novel Burmese Days and in two brilliant autobiographical sketches. he felt increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial police ofﬁcer. was an English novelist. 1. better known by his pseudonym George Orwell. essayist. Jan.” classics of expository prose. he took the decisive step of resigning from the imperial police. went to Burma as assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. He won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools. Eng. the latter a profound anti-Utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule. Winchester and Eton. In 1927 Orwell. he thought he could expiate some of his guilt by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe. was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma. and on Jan. of French extraction. on leave to England. 1928. in 1922. His father was a minor British ofﬁcial in the Indian civil service. and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949). India—d.

in which actual incidents are rearranged into something like ﬁction. Immediately after returning from Burma he called himself an anarchist and continued to do so for several years. It combines mordant reporting with a tone of generous anger that was to characterize Orwell’s subsequent writing.7
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dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants. Orwell’s ﬁrst socialist book was an original and unorthodox political treatise entitled The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). established the pattern of his subsequent ﬁction in its portrayal of a sensitive. Orwell’s revulsion against imperialism led not only to his personal rejection of the bourgeois life-style but to a political reorientation as well. together with serious criticism. he began to consider himself a socialist. it ends in a series of sharp criticisms of existing socialist movements. decentralist socialism. Burmese Days (1934). In 1944 Orwell ﬁnished Animal Farm. and emotionally isolated individual who is at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment. however. a political fable based on the story of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin. and tramped the roads of England with professional vagrants and joined the people of the London slums in their annual exodus to work in the Kentish hopﬁelds. sharing and observing their lives. Orwell’s ﬁrst novel.These experiences gave Orwell the material for Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). It begins by describing his experiences when he went to live among the destitute and unemployed miners of northern England. The book’s publication in 1933 earned him some initial literary recognition. that combined patriotic sentiment with the advocacy of a libertarian. conscientious. In this book a group of barnyard animals overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up
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. during the 1930s. writing many newspaper articles and reviews. In the 1940s Orwell was a proliﬁc journalist.

” “doublethink”) became bywords for modern political abuses. was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Parral. 23. He worked between bouts of hospitalization for tuberculosis. diplomat. Orwell’s last book. Orwell’s warning of the potential dangers of totalitarianism made a deep impression on his contemporaries and upon subsequent readers. When it appeared in 1945 Animal Farm made him famous and. Born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. The novel is set in an imaginary future in which the world is dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. He was perhaps the most important Latin American poet of the 20th century. Santiago. Orwell wrote the last pages of 1984 in a remote house on the Hebridean island of Jura. 1973.” “newspeak. which he was legally to adopt in 1946. Chile—d. July 12. of which he died in a London hospital in January 1950. Santiago)
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ablo Neruda. a Chilean poet. In 1921 he moved to Santiago to continue his
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. is a novel he wrote as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism. and politician. which he had bought from the proceeds of Animal Farm. Neruda ﬁrst published his poems in the local newspapers and later in magazines published in the Chilean capital. and the book’s title and many of its coined words and phrases (“Big Brother is watching you. His father tried to discourage him from writing. 1984 (1949).
PABLO NERUDA
(b. 1904. which was probably why the young poet began to publish under the pseudonym Pablo Neruda.7
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an egalitarian society of their own. Neruda began to write poetry at age 10. prosperous. for the ﬁrst time. Sept.

In 1930 Neruda was named consul in Batavia (modern Jakarta). Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair). From Rangoon Neruda moved to Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). His ﬁrst book of poems. In 1932 Neruda returned to
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. was published in 1923. poignant. but his poetry was not a steady source of income. It became an instant success and is still one of Neruda’s most popular books. Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924. conventional lyricism of Twenty Love Poems. and direct. abandoning normal syntax. rhyme. which was then the capital of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). and stanzaic organization to create a highly personalized poetic technique. and death that he recorded in a cryptic. The verse in Twenty Love Poems is vigorous. He managed to get himself appointed honorary consul to Rangoon in Burma (now Yangôn. who were heirs to ancient cultures but were downtrodden by poverty. The poems express young. It was during these years in Asia that he wrote Residencia en la tierra. Myanmar). and political oppression. decay. In this book Neruda moves beyond the lucid. His personal and collective anguish gives rise to nightmarish visions of disintegration. colonial rule. His second book. was inspired by an unhappy love affair. yet subtle and very original in its imagery and metaphors. and for the next ﬁve years he represented his country in Asia. chaos. however. He continued to live in abject poverty. 1925–1931 (1933. difﬁcult style inspired by Surrealism. More collections followed.7
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studies and become a French teacher. Residence on Earth). Crepusculario. unhappy love perhaps better than any book of poetry in the long Romantic tradition. passionate. He increasingly came to identify with the South Asian masses. and he was tormented by loneliness. since as honorary consul he received no salary.

The poem would become one of his key works. however. In this edition. In 1933 he was appointed Chilean consul in Buenos Aires. that he would complete only after being driven into exile from Chile. where he moved ever closer to communism. trans. After supporting the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Resonant with historical and epic overtones. In 1940 he took up a post as Chile’s consul general in Mexico. more accessible style in order to better communicate his new social concerns to the reader. after the government he had supported as a member of the Communist Party turned toward the right. Canto general (1950.
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. He also began work on a long poem. the bloody Soviet dictator in power at the time. Argentina.7
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Chile. where he supervised the migration to Chile of many defeated Spanish Republicans who had escaped to France. Neruda begins to move away from the highly personal.” Eng. particularly the wars of liberation from Spanish rule and the continuing struggle of its peoples to obtain freedom and social justice. Canto general). A second. Neruda returned to Chile in 1937 and entered his country’s political life. often hermetic poetry of the ﬁrst Residencia volume. enlarged edition of the Residencia poems entitled Residencia en la tierra. and its history. its fauna. this epic poem celebrates Latin America—its ﬂora. but he still could not earn a living from his poetry. It also. In 1939 he was appointed special consul in Paris. 1925–35 was published in two volumes in 1935. celebrates Joseph Stalin. and soon he was transferred to the consulate in Madrid. giving lectures and poetry readings while also defending Republican Spain and Chile’s new centre-left government. adopting a more extroverted outlook and a clearer. Spain. In 1934 Neruda took up an appointment as consul in Barcelona. “General Song.

and playwright Samuel Beckett was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. Oscar Wilde. 1906.g. precise. County Dublin. 1989. Ire. and humorous—and it contained descriptions of everyday objects. From 1923 to 1927. Dublin. and Neruda was able to return home. he came from a Protestant. He wrote in both French and English and is perhaps best known for his plays.7
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In 1952 the political situation in Chile once again became favourable. Its verse was written in a new poetic style—simple.
SAMUEL BECKETT
(b. he returned to Chile bedridden and terminally ill. in what became Northern Ireland. By that time his works had been translated into many languages. After traveling to Stockholm to receive his prize. critic. and beings (e. and William Butler Yeats. France)
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uthor. W aiting for Godot). where he received his bachelor’s
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. Dec.. One of his major works. a school that catered to the Anglo-Irish middle classes. situations. was published in 1954. Foxrock. direct. 22. Beckett was born in a suburb of Dublin. While already ill with cancer in France. Neruda in 1971 learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. At the age of 14 he went to the Portora Royal School. Neruda’s poetic output during these years was stimulated by his international fame and personal happiness. Ode to the Onion and Ode to the Cat). Paris. 20 books of his appeared between 1958 and his death in 1973. especially En attendant Godot (1952. Like his fellow Irish writers George Bernard Shaw. Odas elementales (Elemental Odes). and 8 more were published posthumously.—d. and he was rich and famous. AngloIrish background. April 13?. he studied Romance languages at Trinity College.

The volume More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) contained 10 stories describing episodes in the life of a Dublin intellectual. There followed a period of intense creativity. he never served as Joyce’s secretary. In the winter of 1945. he was able to remain there even after the occupation of Paris by the Germans. but he joined an underground resistance group in 1941. As a citizen of a country that was neutral in World War II. but after only four terms he resigned. he ﬁnally returned to Paris and was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his resistance work. After a brief spell of teaching in Belfast. Until the liberation of the country. and Italy. and joined his circle. in 1942. Normandy. His relatively few prewar publications included two essays on Joyce and the French novelist Marcel Proust. Contrary to often-repeated reports. in December 1931. he immediately went into hiding and eventually moved to the unoccupied zone of France. When.7 Samuel Beckett
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degree. the author of the controversial and seminally modern novel Ulysses. he became a reader in English at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1928. the most concentratedly fruitful period of Beckett’s life. Belacqua Shuah. he supported himself as an agricultural labourer. Germany. He returned to Ireland in 1930 to take up a post as lecturer in French at Trinity College. In 1945 he returned to Ireland but volunteered for the Irish Red Cross and went back to France as an interpreter in a military hospital in Saint-Lô. There he met the self-exiled Irish writer James Joyce. In 1937 Beckett decided to settle in Paris. and embarked upon a period of restless travel in London. he received news that members of his group had been arrested by the Gestapo. France. however. and the novel Murphy (1938) concerns an Irishman in London who escapes from a girl he is
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After his return to Paris. between 1946 and 1949. however. After many refusals. a poem on the French philosopher René Descartes. Beckett continued to live in Paris. that these works saw the light of day. which was not published until 1953. Plays for the stage and radio and a number of prose works occupied much of his attention. a short drive from Paris. He wrote the novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women in the mid-1930s.7
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about to marry to a life of contemplation as a male nurse in a mental institution. Beckett continued writing. Beckett also completed another novel. but more slowly than in the immediate postwar years. that Beckett’s rise to world fame began. the major prose narratives Molloy (1951). His total dedication to his art extended to his complete avoidance of all personal
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. The Unnamable). Malone meurt (1951. the same publisher brought out the two other novels and W aiting for Godot. Beckett produced a number of stories. but it remained incomplete and was not published until 1992. Suzanne DeschevauxDumesnil (later Mme Beckett). During his years in hiding in unoccupied France. the unpublished three-act Eleutheria and Waiting for Godot. Watt. When this book not only proved a modest commercial success but also was received with enthusiasm by the French critics. in January 1953. but most of his writing was done in a small house secluded in the Marne valley. Beckett’s lifelong companion. and L’Innommable (1953. and the collection Echo’s Bones (1935). ﬁnally succeeded in ﬁnding a publisher for Molloy. It was not until 1951. It was with the amazing success of W aiting for Godot at the small Théâtre de Babylone in Paris. and two plays. A number of short stories and poems were scattered in various periodicals. His two slim volumes of poetry were Whoroscope (1930). Malone Dies).

was often shifted from one relative to another. In spite of Beckett’s courageous tackling of the ultimate mystery and despair of human existence. Wright’s grandparents had been slaves. and in 1937 he went to New York City. he was essentially a comic writer. His father left home when he was ﬁve. France)
he novelist and short-story writer Richard Wright was among the ﬁrst black American writers to protest white treatment of blacks. In 1932 he became a member of the Communist Party. U. of appearances on radio or television. Uncle Tom’s Children (1938).. Paris. where he became Harlem editor of the Communist Daily Worker. an objective as old as theatre itself. he got an opportunity to write through the Federal Writers’ Project. Black Boy (1945).. and the boy.—d. in 1969. near Natchez. Nov. Tenn. Sept. after working in unskilled jobs. the ultimate effect of seeing or reading Beckett is one of cathartic release. Wright ﬁrst came to the general public’s attention with a volume of novellas. He worked at a number of jobs before joining the northward migration. and then to Chicago. who grew up in poverty. When. 1960. ﬁrst to Memphis. he accepted the award but declined the trip to Stockholm to avoid the public speech at the ceremonies. 4.7
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publicity. He inaugurated the tradition of protest explored by other black writers after World War II. Miss. based on
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(b. 1908. and of all journalistic interviews.S. 28. Far from being gloomy and depressing. he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. There. notably in his novel Native Son (1940) and his autobiography.

His Native Son and Black Boy have been hailed as landmark protest novels. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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Protest writers—authors who examine social injustices through their work— owe a debt of gratitude to Richard Wright.

Its protagonist. Listen! (1957). and his other works were published in 1991. warned that the black man had awakened in a disintegrating society not ready to include him. sex. Black Boy. a poor black youth named Bigger Thomas. appeared in 1961. written a year later. and in the course of his ensuing ﬂight his hitherto meaningless awareness of antagonism from a white world becomes intelligible. which narrates Wright’s experiences after moving to the North. Black Boy. and politics in Wright’s books had been cut or omitted before original publication.7
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the question: How may a black man live in a country that denies his humanity? In each story but one the hero’s quest ends in death. Some of the more candid passages dealing with race. and his growing awareness of his interest in literature. Wright himself played Bigger Thomas in a motion-picture version made in Argentina in 1951. His ﬁctional scene shifted to Chicago in Native Son. Among his polemical writings of that period was White Man. however. Three later novels were not well-received. acclaimed as the ﬁrst American existential novel. his experience of white prejudice and violence against blacks. Eight Men. After World War II. a collection of short stories. Unexpurgated versions of Native Son. Wright settled in Paris as a permanent expatriate. The autobiographical American Hunger. was published posthumously in 1977. accidentally kills a white girl.
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. is a moving account of his childhood and young manhood in the South. In 1944 Wright left the Communist Party because of political and personal differences. The Outsider (1953). The book was a best-seller and was staged successfully as a play on Broadway (1941) by Orson Welles. The book chronicles the extreme poverty of his childhood. which was originally a series of lectures given in Europe.

O. Welty attended Mississippi State College for Women before transferring to the University of Wisconsin. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty was published in 1980. Jackson.. U. She also worked as a writer for a radio station and newspaper in her native Jackson. “The Petriﬁed Man” and “Why I Live at the P. April 13. 1909. a volume of short stories that contains two of her most anthologized stories. Jackson)
E
udora Welty was an American short-story writer and novelist whose work is mainly focused with great precision on the regional manners of people inhabiting a small Mississippi town that resembles her own birthplace and the Delta country. Her readership grew steadily after the publication of A Curtain of Green (1941. Delta Wedding. before her ﬁction won popular and critical acclaim. and in 1946 her ﬁrst full-length novel.
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EUDORA WELTY
(b. and The Optimist’s Daughter (1972). and thereafter her work began to appear regularly. 2001. Losing Battles (1970). Her later novels include The Ponder Heart (1954). During the Great Depression she was a photographer on the Works Progress Administration’s Guide to Mississippi.—d. Photographs (1989) is a collection of many of the photographs she took for the WPA. from which she graduated in 1929.” In 1942 her short novel The Robber Bridegroom was issued. The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943). The Golden Apples (1949). Welty’s ﬁrst short story was published in 1936. enlarged 1979). Miss. ﬁrst in little magazines such as the Southern Review and later in major periodicals such as The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker. July 23. and photography remained a lifelong interest. which won a Pulitzer Prize.S. Mississippi. and The Eye of the Story (1978) is a volume of essays. and The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955) are collections of short stories.

Palace Walk). it beautifully evoked what Welty styled her “sheltered life” in Jackson and how her early ﬁction grew out of it. His early novels.7
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Welty’s main subject is the intricacies of human relationships. particularly as revealed through her characters’ interactions in intimate social encounters. Cairo)
he Egyptian novelist and screenplay writer Naguid Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. Mahfouz’s earliest published works were short stories. 2006. such as Rādūbīs (1943. Aug. insensitivity. Among her themes are the subjectivity and ambiguity of people’s perception of character and the presence of virtue hidden beneath an obscuring surface of convention. Cairo. Egypt—d. 11. Welty’s outlook is hopeful. Its three novels—Bayn al-qasrayn (1956. known as The Cairo Trilogy. Originating in a series of three lectures given at Harvard. One Writer’s Beginnings. but he had turned to describing modern Egyptian society by the time he began his major work. and social prejudice. Mahfouz was the son of a civil servant and grew up in Cairo’s Al-Jamāliyyah district. He worked in the Egyptian civil service in a variety of positions from 1934 until his retirement in 1971. Qa r
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. were set in ancient Egypt. Dec. Al-Thulāthiyyah (1956–57). an autobiographical work. Her works combine humour and psychological acuity with a sharp ear for regional speech patterns. 30. and love is viewed as a redeeming presence in the midst of isolation and indifference. where in 1934 he received a degree in philosophy. the ﬁrst Arabic writer to be so honoured. was published in 1984. 1911.
NAGUIB MAHFOUZ
(b. “Radobis”). He attended Fu’ād I University (now Cairo University).

brought the genre to maturity within Arabic literature. Sugar Street)—depict the lives of three generations of different families in Cairo from World War I until after the 1952 military coup that overthrew King Farouk. Wedding Song). Mahfouz wrote more than 45 novels and short-story collections. God’s World). British colonialism. Afrā al-qubba (1981. and Other Stories (1991) and The Seventh Heaven (2005) are collections of his stories in English translation. as well as some 30 screenplays
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.abā wa-al-masā’ (1987. all of which consider Egyptian society under Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime. and contemporary Egypt. Moses. In subsequent works Mahfouz offered critical views of the old Egyptian monarchy. Al-Sha ādh (1965. attitudes. Children of the Alley) was banned in Egypt for a time because of its controversial treatment of religion and its use of characters based on Muhammad. and in 1994 Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck. and Mīrāmār (1967. Several of his more notable novels deal with social issues involving women and political prisoners. The Beggar). and Al-Sukkariyyah (1957. Palace of Desire). Mahfouz’s achievements as a short-story writer are demonstrated in such collections as Dunyā Allāh (1963. His novel Awlād āratinā (1959. The Time and the Place. Miramar). The Thief and the Dogs). later called for his death. and other ﬁgures. Mahfouz’s other novels include Al-Li wa-al-kilāb (1961. Together. Morning and Evening Talk). which were among the ﬁrst to gain widespread acceptance in the Arabic-speaking world. and the structurally experimental adīth al. his novels. set among several characters associated with a Cairo theatre company. partly because of their outrage over the work. which strings together in alphabetical order dozens of character sketches. The trilogy provides a penetrating overview of 20th-century Egyptian thought.7 Naguib Mahfouz
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al-shawq (1957. and social change. Islamic militants.

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and several plays. La Peste (1947. Henry de Montherlant. Throughout the 1930s. by an attack of tuberculosis. 7. essayist. near Sens. While attending the University of Algiers. He obtained a diplôme d’études supérieures in 1936 for a thesis on the relationship between Greek and Christian thought in the philosophical writings of Plotinus and St. He received the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature. Camus broadened his interests. He read the French classics as well as the writers of the day—among them André Gide. and acted for the Théâtre du Travail (Workers’ Theatre. Echoes of an Autobiography) is a collection of parables and his sayings. The Stranger). France)
he French novelist. he wrote. His candidature for the agrégation (a qualiﬁcation that would have enabled him to take up a university career) was cut short. later named the Théâtre de l’Équipe). Augustine. and playwright Albert Camus was best known for such novels as L’Étranger (1942. Alg. Jan. adapted. and La Chute (1956. The Plague).—d. In 1996 the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature was established to honour Arabic writers. Pisa. who helped him to develop his literary and philosophical ideas. For a short period in 1934–35 he was also a member of the Algerian Communist Party. produced. which
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. Nov. and Genoa. Mondovi. To regain his health he went to a resort in the French Alps—his ﬁrst visit to Europe—and eventually returned to Algiers via Florence. 4. 1913. 1960. however. In addition.
ALBERT CAMUS
(b. The Fall) and for his work in leftist causes. Asdā’ al-sīrah al-dhātiyyah (1996. Camus was particularly inﬂuenced by one of his teachers. André Malraux—and was a prominent ﬁgure among the young left-wing intellectuals of Algiers. Jean Grenier.

his plays are the least-admired part of his literary output. He reviewed some of Jean-Paul Sartre’s early literary works and wrote an important series of articles analyzing social conditions among the Muslims of the Kabylie region. Camus served his apprenticeship as a journalist with AlgerRépublicain in many capacities. is a study of 20th-century alienation with a portrait of an “outsider” condemned to death less for shooting an Arab than for the fact that he never says more than he genuinely feels and refuses to conform to society’s demands. remain landmarks in the Theatre of the Absurd. La Peste (1947. In the two years before the outbreak of World War II. reprinted in abridged form in Actuelles III (1958). Ironically. with considerable sympathy.7 Albert Camus
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aimed to bring outstanding plays to working-class audiences. ﬁrst produced in 1944 and 1945. he held an independent left-wing position based on the ideals of justice and truth and the belief that all political action must have a solid moral basis. He enjoyed the most inﬂuence as a journalist during the ﬁnal years of the occupation of France and the immediate post-Liberation period. respectively. although Le Malentendu (Cross Purpose) and Caligula. in which Camus. Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus).
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. and his second novel. a brilliant ﬁrst novel begun before the war and published in 1942. L’Étranger (The Stranger).” He was already seeking a way of overcoming nihilism. analyzed contemporary nihilism and a sense of the “absurd. The same year saw the publication of an inﬂuential philosophical essay. These articles. By now Camus had become a leading literary ﬁgure. the successor of a Resistance newssheet run largely by Camus. As editor of the Parisian daily Combat. He maintained a deep love of the theatre until his death. drew attention (15 years in advance) to many of the injustices that led to the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954.

Less than three years later Camus was killed in an automobile accident. and political theorist. La Chute reveals a preoccupation with Christian symbolism and contains an ironical and witty exposure of the more complacent forms of secular humanist morality. his vote would certainly have gone to André Malraux. with Sartre. 2008. 1918. at the early age of 44. as a leading practitioner of the existential novel. the estrangement of the individual from himself. He is remembered. is a symbolical account of the ﬁght against an epidemic in Oran by characters whose importance lies less in the (doubtful) success with which they oppose the epidemic than in their determined assertion of human dignity and fraternity. Dec. moralist. Kislovodsk. Exile and the Kingdom). L’Exil et le royaume (1957. near Moscow)
A
leksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. With characteristic modesty he declared that had he been a member of the awarding committee. a Russian novelist and historian. As novelist and playwright. Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1957. not only in France but also in Europe and eventually the world. and the pressing ﬁnality of death.
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. Aug. was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. His writings. the problem of evil. Russia—d. 3.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
(b.7
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The Plague). Albert Camus after World War II became the spokesman of his own generation and the mentor of the next. TroitseLykovo. 11. accurately reﬂected the alienation and disillusionment of the postwar intellectual. His other major literary works are the technically brilliant novel La Chute (1956) and a collection of short stories. which addressed themselves mainly to the isolation of man in an alien universe.

in 1945. after which he spent three more years in enforced exile. Encouraged by the loosening of government restraints on cultural life that was a hallmark of the de-Stalinizing policies of the early 1960s. Solzhenitsyn submitted his short
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. Rehabilitated in 1956. in order to publish his work. however. he was allowed to settle in Ryazan. where he became a mathematics teacher and began to write. he eventually returned to Russia and become an honoured citizen. AFP/Getty Images
Solzhenitsyn fought in World War II. and suffered imprisonment. in central Russia. he was arrested for writing a letter in which he criticized Joseph Stalin and spent eight years in prisons and labour camps.7
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn resorted to subterfuge. Exiled from the Soviet Union. achieving the rank of captain of artillery.

and Solzhenitsyn met ﬁrst with increasing criticism and then with overt harassment from the authorities when he emerged as an eloquent opponent of repressive government policies. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) to the leading Soviet literary periodical Novy Mir (“New World”). among them V kruge pervom (1968. however. but he declined to go to Stockholm to receive
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. The following years were marked by the foreign publication of several ambitious novels that secured Solzhenitsyn’s international literary reputation. and he resorted to circulating them in the form of samizdat (“self-published”) literature—i. which traces the varying responses of scientists at work on research for the secret police as they must decide whether to cooperate with the authorities and thus remain within the research prison or to refuse their services and be thrust back into the brutal conditions of the labour camps. Ideological strictures on cultural activity in the Soviet Union tightened with Nikita Khrushchev’s fall from power in 1964. After the publication of a collection of his short stories in 1963. In 1970 Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The novel quickly appeared in that journal’s pages and met with immediate popularity. Solzhenitsyn’s period of ofﬁcial favour proved to be short-lived. where it inspired a number of other writers to produce accounts of their imprisonment under Stalin’s regime. described a typical day in the life of an inmate of a forced-labour camp during the Stalin era. as illegal literature circulated clandestinely—as well as publishing them abroad. Solzhenitsyn becoming an instant celebrity. based on Solzhenitsyn’s own experiences.e.. he was denied further ofﬁcial publication of his work. Ivan Denisovich. The First Circle).7
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novel Odin den iz zhizni Ivana Denisovicha (1962. The book produced a political sensation both abroad and in the Soviet Union.

1974. (Gulag is an acronym formed from the ofﬁcial Soviet designation of its system of prisons and labour camps.) The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn’s attempt to compile a literary-historical record of the vast system of prisons and labour camps that came into being shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia (1917) and that underwent an enormous expansion during the rule of Stalin (1924–53). Various sections of the work describe the arrest. The work mingles historical exposition and Solzhenitsyn’s own autobiographical accounts with the voluminous personal testimony of other inmates that he collected and committed to memory during his imprisonment. Upon publication of the ﬁrst volume of The Gulag Archipelago. interrogation. transportation. The second and third volumes of The Gulag Archipelago were published in 1974–75. In December 1973 the ﬁrst parts of Arkhipelag Gulag (The Gulag Archipelago) were published in Paris after a copy of the manuscript had been seized in the Soviet Union by the KGB. where he eventually settled on a secluded estate in Cavendish. Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union on the following day. Solzhenitsyn tended to reject Western emphases on democracy and individual freedom and instead favoured the formation of a benevolent authoritarian regime that would draw upon the resources of Russia’s traditional
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the prize for fear he would not be readmitted to the Soviet Union by the government upon his return. and in December he took possession of his Nobel Prize. he was arrested and charged with treason on Feb. conviction. Solzhenitsyn traveled to the United States. Despite the intense interest in his fate that was shown in the West. Vt. 12. In presenting alternatives to the Soviet regime. Solzhenitsyn was immediately attacked in the Soviet press. and imprisonment of the Gulag’s victims as practiced by Soviet authorities over four decades.

Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov: ocherki izgnaniia (“The Little Grain Managed to Land Between Two Millstones: Sketches of Exile”). Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet citizenship was ofﬁcially restored in 1990. Kerouac. Burroughs. where he met two writers who would become lifelong friends: Allen Ginsberg and William S.. St. Lowell. 1969. who spoke joual (a Canadian dialect of French).—d. is best for his
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.
JACK KEROUAC
(b. on a football scholarship. In 2007 Solzhenitsyn was awarded Russia’s prestigious State Prize for his contribution to humanitarian causes..)
book On the Road (1957). which captured the spirit of its time as no other work of the 20th century did. He subsequently made several public appearances and even met privately with Russian Pres. Fla. The introduction of glasnost (“openness”) in the late 1980s brought renewed access to Solzhenitsyn’s work in the Soviet Union. attended a French Canadian school in Lowell. Boris Yeltsin. an American novelist andknownand the leader of the Beat movement.S. Mass. In 1940 Kerouac enrolled at Columbia University. 1922. Solzhenitsyn ended his exile and returned to Russia in 1994. were published from 1998 to 2003. a preparatory school in New York City. He subsequently went to the Horace Mann School. Oct. Petersburg.7
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Christian values. U. In 1989 the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir published the ﬁrst ofﬁcially approved excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago. March 12. 21. Together with Kerouac they are the seminal ﬁgures of the Beat movement. Installments of his autobiography. Mass.
poet J ack Kerouac. in the morning and continued his studies in English in the afternoon.

which took shape in the late 1940s through various drafts of his second novel.” His ﬁrst novel.
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. whose Time and the River (1935) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940) were then popular. is legendary: composed of approximately 120 feet (37 metres) of paper taped together and fed into a manual typewriter. Readers often confused Kerouac with Sal Paradise. received favourable reviews but was considered derivative of the novels of Thomas Wolfe. Yet Kerouac was unhappy with the pace of his prose. and endless movement. His boyhood ambition had been to write the “great American novel. it ﬁnally was printed in 1957. Kerouac wanted to achieve in his writing that which he could ﬁnd neither in the promise of America nor in the empty spirituality of Roman Catholicism. Kerouac found himself a national sensation after On the Road received a rave review from The New York Times. the scroll allowed Kerouac the fast pace he was hoping to achieve. Kerouac felt that the Beat label marginalized him and prevented him from being treated as he wanted to be treated. the amoral hipster at the centre of his novel. The Town & the City (1950). Kerouac had already written a million words.7 Jack Kerouac
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By the time Kerouac and Burroughs met. Through the novel’s characterization of hipsters and their nonconformist celebration of sex. he strived instead for the serenity that he had discovered in his adopted Buddhism. in 1944. a scroll written in a three-week blast in 1951. On the Road. The original manuscript. Rejected for publication at ﬁrst. This misreading dominated negative reactions to On the Road. The critic Norman Podhoretz famously wrote that Beat writing was an assault against the intellect and against decency.” as Ginsberg later called it. The music of bebop jazz artists Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker began to drive Kerouac toward his “spontaneous bop prosody. jazz.

Another important autobiographical book. By the 1960s Kerouac had ﬁnished most of the writing for which he is best known. Kerouac also bolstered his standing among the Beat writers as a poet supreme. Kerouac’s poetry. With his sonnets and odes he ranged across Western poetic traditions. began to show the inﬂuence of the haiku. and many of his books were out of print. a sequential poem comprising 242 choruses. recounts stories of his childhood. An alcoholic. in California’s Big Sur region. he was living with his third wife and his mother in St. where he spent his time in local bars. Petersburg. after his “road” period and in the lull between composing On the Road in 1951 and its publication in 1957. In 1961 he wrote Big Sur in 10 days while living in the cabin of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. As he continued to experiment with his prose style. a genre mostly unknown to Americans at that time.
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. a fellow Beat poet. In the fall of 1953 he ﬁnished The Subterraneans (it would be published in 1958). as well as that of Ginsberg and fellow Beats Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. In 1969 Kerouac was broke.7
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as a man of letters in the American tradition of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. he read Henry David Thoreau and fantasized a life outside civilization. and the dramatic scandals that deﬁned early Beat legend. Fla.. After he met the poet Gary Snyder in 1955. Kerouac turned to Buddhist study and practice from 1953 to 1956. his schooling. A week after he had been beaten by fellow drinkers whom he had antagonized. He also experimented with the idioms of blues and jazz in such works as Mexico City Blues (1959). V anity of Duluoz (1968). Fed up with the world after the failed love affair upon which the book was based. He immersed himself in the study of Zen. he died of internal hemorrhaging while sitting in front of his television.

The collection’s
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.” Wise Blood consists of a series of near-independent chapters—many of which originated in previously published short stories—that tell the tale of Hazel Motes. usually set in the rural American South and often treating alienation. a short story. Her ﬁrst published work. 3. she studied creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.. Her ﬁrst novel.S. Ga. The work combines the keen ear for common speech. in O’Connor’s own words. After graduating from Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University) in 1945. which leads to a series of interactions with the grotesque inhabitants of his hometown. caustic religious imagination. Aug. 1964. and ﬂair for the absurd that were to characterize her subsequent work. ﬁrst collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955). Wise Blood (1952. O’Connor grew up in a prominent Roman Catholic family in her native Georgia. a man who returns home from military service and founds the Church Without Christ. Milledgeville. U. the “religious consciousness without a religion. March 25. 1925.—d. Ga. appeared in the magazine Accent in 1946. are concerned with the relationship between the individual and God. Savannah. With the publication of further short stories. but the worsening of her father’s lupus erythematosus forced the family to relocate in 1938 to the home in rural Milledgeville where her mother had been raised. ﬁlm 1979). she came to be regarded as a master of the form. She lived in Savannah until her adolescence.7
Flannery O’Connor
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FLANNERY O’CONNOR
(b. explored.)
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lannery O’Connor was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works.

A collection of occasional prose pieces. provided valuable insight into the life and mind of a writer whose works defy conventional categorization. Mystery and Manners. O’Connor lived modestly. Her other works of ﬁction are a novel. and the short-story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). She explained the prevalence of brutality in her stories by noting that violence “is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. along with the attendant degradation of the corporeal. published posthumously in 1971. often depraved. O’Connor’s corpus is notable for the seeming incongruity of a devout Catholic whose darkly comic works commonly feature startling acts of violence and unsympathetic. which eventually proved fatal. Disabled for more than a decade by the lupus erythematosus she inherited from her father.7
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eponymous story has become possibly her best-known work. who kills a quarreling family on vacation in the Deep South. contained several stories that had not previously appeared in book form. characters. appeared in 1969.
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.” It is this divine stripping of man’s comforts and hubris. writing and raising peafowl on her mother’s farm at Milledgeville. under the title The Habit of Being (1979). that stands as the most salient feature of O’Connor’s work. The Complete Stories. The posthumous publication of her letters. In it O’Connor creates an unexpected agent of salvation in the character of an escaped convict called The Misﬁt. The Violent Bear It Away (1960). it won a National Book Award in 1972. published as The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews (1983). and her book reviews and correspondence with local diocesan newspapers.

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TONI MORRISON
(b. songs. Lorain. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Brad Barket/Getty Images
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. grew up in the American Midwest in a family that possessed an intense love of and appreciation for black culture.)
oni Morrison is an American writer noted for her examination of the black experience. 18. U. particularly black female experience. Feb. born Chloe Anthony Wofford. Morrison. Ohio. and folktales were a deeply formative part of her childhood. Her novels have won critical and popular acclaim. 1931.. She attended Howard University (B.A.S. 1953) and Cornell
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Toni Morrison has given elegant voice to the black female experience. Storytelling.

Jazz (1992) is a story of violence and passion set in New York City’s Harlem during the 1920s. its publication brought Morrison to national attention. Many of her essays and speeches were collected in What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonﬁction (edited by Carolyn C. explores conﬂicts of race. Subsequent novels are Paradise (1998). From 1984 she taught writing at the State University of New Y at Albany. is a novel of initiation concerning a victimized adolescent black girl who is obsessed by white standards of beauty and longs to have blue eyes. Sula. a richly detailed portrait of a black utopian community in Oklahoma. she taught at Howard from 1957 to 1964. The critically acclaimed Beloved (1987). is based on the true story of a runaway slave who. was published. both written with her son and published in 2003. Song of Solomon (1977) is told by a male narrator in search of his identity. Additionally. Morrison released several children’s books.7
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University (M. Denard). including Who’s Got Game?: The Ant or the Grasshopper? and Who’s Got Game?: The Lion or the Mouse?. A Mercy (2008) deals with slavery in 17th-century America. set on a Caribbean island. which won a Pulitzer Prize for ﬁction. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. The Bluest Eye (1970).A. class. at the point of recapture. Morrison’s ﬁrst book. Tar Baby (1981).. it examines (among other issues) the dynamics of friendship and the expectations for conformity within the community. After teaching at Texas Southern University for two years. and Love (2003). Remember (2004) chronicles the hardships
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. ork leaving in 1989 to join the faculty of Princeton University. A work of criticism. kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of slavery. In 1973 a second novel. was published in 1992. 1955). published in 2008. and sex. In 1965 she became a ﬁction editor. an intricate family story that reveals the myriad facets of love and its ostensible opposite.

Her use of fantasy.7 Toni Morrison
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of black students during the integration of the American public school system. and her rich interweaving of the mythic gave her stories great strength and texture. He sometimes wrote of modern West Africa in a satirical style. aimed at children. The central theme of Morrison’s novels is the black American experience. making fun of pompous. Abeokuta. an opera about the same story that inspired Beloved. Soyinka attended Government College and University College in Ibadan before graduating in 1958 with a degree in English from the University of Leeds in England. In an unjust society. published 1963) and
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. He wrote several plays in a lighter vein. 1934. A Dance of the Forests (produced 1960. her sinuous poetic style.
WOLE SOYINKA
(b. he founded an acting company and wrote his ﬁrst important play. Upon his return to Nigeria. for the Nigerian independence celebrations. The play satirizes the ﬂedgling nation by stripping it of romantic legend and by showing that the present is no more a golden age than was the past. her characters struggle to ﬁnd themselves and their cultural identity. She also wrote the libretto for Margaret Garner (2005). published 1963). but his serious intent and his belief in the evils inherent in the exercise of power usually was evident in his work as well. 1959. A member of the Yoruba people. July 13. Nigeria)
W
ole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright and political activist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Westernized schoolteachers in The Lion and the Jewel (ﬁrst performed in Ibadan. it uses archival photographs juxtaposed with captions speculating on the thoughts of their subjects.

Soyinka also wrote novels—The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy (1973)—and several volumes of poetry. he also was sought after as a lecturer. and many of his lectures were published—notably the Reith Lectures of 2004. In these and Soyinka’s other dramas. His best works exhibit humour and ﬁne poetic style as well as a gift for irony and satire and for accurately matching the language of his complex characters to their social position and moral qualities. published 1971). Other notable plays include Madmen and Specialists (performed 1970. an important literary journal. From 1960 to 1964. 1966. Soyinka was coeditor of Black Orpheus. ﬂashback.
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. Ife. and The Beatiﬁcation of Area Boy (1995). Symbolism. reveal his disregard for African authoritarian leadership and his disillusionment with Nigerian society as a whole. Though he considered himself primarily a playwright. published 2002). as Climate of Fear (2004). The Road (1965). published 1963) and Jero’s Metamorphosis (1973). including those of Ibadan. such as The Strong Breed (1963). and even the parody King Baabu (performed 2001. published 1967). and Other Poems (1967) and Poems from Prison (1969.7
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mocking the clever preachers of upstart prayer-churches who grow fat on the credulity of their parishioners in The Trials of Brother Jero (performed 1960. 1972). But his more serious plays. with Love (1992). and Lagos. From 1960 onward he taught literature and drama and headed theatre groups at various Nigerian universities. The latter include Idanre. Kongi’s Harvest (opened the ﬁrst Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar. Western elements are skillfully fused with subject matter and dramatic techniques deeply rooted in Yoruba folklore and religion. Death and the King’s Horseman (1975). After winning the Nobel Prize. and ingenious plotting contribute to a rich dramatic structure. From Zia. republished as A Shuttle in the Crypt.

1947. June 19. He continued to address Africa’s ills and Western responsibility in The Open Sore of a Continent (1996) and The Burden of Memory. and Outrage (1988) is a work on similar themes of art.7 Wole Soyinka
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published together as Early Poems (1998). Bombay [now Mumbai]. Soyinka’s principal critical work is Myth. and meditative poetic forms. The Man Died (1972) is his prose account of his arrest and 22-month imprisonment. 1946–1965 (1994).
SIR SALMAN RUSHDIE
(b. Literature. In 2006 he published another memoir. His case became the focus of an international controversy.
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. You Must Set Forth at Dawn. An autobiography. and the African World (1976). dramatic. culture. Aké: The Years of Childhood. Dialogue. a collection of essays in which he examines the role of the artist in the light of Yoruba mythology and symbolism. Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1988). and society. His verse is characterized by a precise command of language and a mastery of lyric. the Muse of Forgiveness (1999). was published in 1981 and followed by the companion pieces Ìsarà: A Voyage Around Essay (1989) and Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years: A Memoir. Soyinka was the ﬁrst black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 2005–06 Soyinka served on the Encyclopædia Britannica Editorial Board of Advisors. He wrote a good deal of Poems from Prison while he was jailed in 1967–69 for speaking out against the war brought on by the attempted secession of Biafra from Nigeria. and Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known (2002). India)
S
ir Salman Rushdie remains best known as the AngloIndian novelist who was condemned to death by leading Iranian Muslim clerics in 1989 for allegedly having blasphemed Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses. Art.

was an unexpected critical and popular success that won him international recognition. Midnight’s Children is an allegorical fable that examines historical and philosophical issues by means of surreal characters. a collection of essays and criticism. The Satanic Verses. Public demonstrations against the book spread to Pakistan in January 1989. who denounced the novel as blasphemous. a bounty was offered to anyone who would execute him. based on contemporary politics in Pakistan. after the novel’s publication in the summer of 1988. Rushdie continued to write. His next novel. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The novel Shame (1983). sometimes in other countries—he was compelled to restrict his movements.7
The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time
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Rushdie was the son of a prosperous Muslim businessman in India. the children’s novel Haroun
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. publicly condemned the book and issued a fatwa (legal opinion) against Rushdie. and—although he occasionally emerged unexpectedly. degree in history in 1968. Grimus. drew criticism from Muslim community leaders in Britain. receiving an M. Throughout most of the 1970s he worked in London as an advertising copywriter. Like Rushdie’s subsequent ﬁction. Midnight’s Children (1981). He went into hiding under the protection of Scotland Yard. was also popular. Some of the adventures in this book depict a character modeled on the Prophet Muhammad and portray both him and his transcription of the Qur’ān in a manner that. and an effusive and melodramatic prose style. and his ﬁrst published novel. On February 14 the spiritual leader of revolutionary Iran.A. Despite the standing death threat. He was educated at Rugby School and the University of Cambridge. encountered a different reception. but Rushdie’s fourth novel. brooding humour. an allegory about modern India. producing Imaginary Homelands (1991). appeared in 1975.

a novel set primarily in the disputed Kashmir region of the Indian subcontinent. Rowling is the creator of the popular and critically acclaimed Harry Potter series. an honour criticized by the Iranian government and Pakistan’s parliament. In the early 1990s she traveled to Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. she returned to the
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. after a brief marriage and the birth of her daughter. The Enchantress of Florence (2008) is based on a ﬁctionalized account of the Mughal emperor Akbar.)
he British author J. 1965. Rushdie was knighted in 2007. ROWLING
(b. examines the nature of terrorism. Eng. Rowling began working for Amnesty International in London. Step Across This Line (2002) is a collection of essays he wrote between 1992 and 2002 on subjects from the September 11 attacks to The Wizard of Oz.7
Sir Salman Rushdie
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and the Sea of Stories (1990). West (1994). In 1998. He subsequently won the Booker of Bookers (1993) and the Best of the Booker (2008). After graduating from the University of Exeter in 1986. These special prizes were voted on by the public in honour of the prize’s 25th and 40th anniversaries. about a young sorcerer in training. after nearly a decade.
J. Rushdie received the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children. near Bristol. respectively. Chipping Sodbury. and the novel The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). the Iranian government announced it would no longer seek to enforce its fatwa against Rushdie. but. July 31. where she started to write the Harry Potter adventures. Shalimar the Clown (2005). Rushdie’s subsequent novels include The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) and Fury (2001). K. K. the short-story collection East.

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. K. Her Harry Potter series of books is also popular with adults around the globe.7 The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time
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J. Rowling is widely credited for getting modern-day children back into reading.

was released in 2007. Rowling
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United Kingdom. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999). Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997. Other works include the companion books Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages. it followed the adventures of the unlikely hero Harry Potter. a collection of fairy tales. with proceeds going to charity. A ﬁlm version of the ﬁrst Harry Potter book was released in 2001 and became one of the topgrossing movies in the world. settling in Edinburgh. Living on public assistance between stints as a French teacher. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000). also published as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone). The seventh and ﬁnal installment in the series. both of which were published in 2001. In 2008 Rowling followed her successful Harry Potter series with The Tales of Beedle the Bard. and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005)—also were best-sellers. appealing to both children (its intended audience) and adults. Succeeding volumes—Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998). including the British Book Award. was an immediate success.7
J. a lonely orphan who discovers that he is actually a wizard and enrolls in the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
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. available in more than 200 countries and some 60 languages. In 2009 she was named a chevalier of the French Legion of Honour. Other volumes were also made into highly successful ﬁlms.K. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003). she continued to write. The book received numerous awards. Rowling was appointed OBE (Ofﬁcer of the British Empire) in March 2001. Rowling’s ﬁrst book in the series. Featuring vivid descriptions and an imaginative story line. The Harry Potter series sparked great enthusiasm among children and was credited with generating a new interest in reading.

anecdotal Based on unscientiﬁc reports and observations. dream-vision form A style of narrative poetry in which the main character falls asleep and.GLOSSARY
allegory The use of ﬁctional ﬁgures and actions to symbolize truths or generalizations about human existence. instructive. when a larger story is told through several smaller stories in sequence. in the ancient Greek tradition. didactic A story written or told in such a way that it teaches the reader/listener a moral. and recitation. according to literary critics. or moral signiﬁcance. extant Still in existence. describes a scene that depicts a story. anodyne An activity or method that calms or relieves pain and tension. respond to and comment on the main action of a play with song. heroic A type of verse form in which. in his or her dream.
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. experiences events having representational. dramaturgy Theatre arts. docti Scholarly poets. dance. poetry of a certain language and age should be written. episodic Made up of a series of episodes. epic poem Long and highly stylized poetry that details the heroic achievements of the main protagonist. or the act of writing plays. chorus Describes a group of actors who.

metre The rhythmic arrangement of syllables in verse. qa īdah Classical Arabic ode. phraseology The way in which phrases are used to create a writer’s style. public compliment. novellas Short narratives with their origins in medieval Italy. often offered after the honoree’s death. picaresque Describes a story that involves a rogue or adventurer surviving mainly by his or her wits in a treacherous society. paean Choral chant to a god.7 Glossary
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martial Having to do with war or military life.
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. panegyric A formal. sabi Love of the old. recitation Speaking several lines of written material before an audience. motif A dominant or recurrent theme. the faded. and the unobtrusive. polemic Describes a controversial opinion that attacks another more popular opinion or doctrine. set piece A work of art with a formal theme. created mainly to show the artist’s or writer’s skill. protagonist The main character in a work of literature or drama.